We are pleased to announce that Hlayisani Venture Fund II has led a R50 million Series A investment into Wamly — one of South Africa's leading all-in-one hiring systems, and one of the fastest-growing HR technology companies on the African continent.
Wamly was founded in 2020 by Industrial Psychologist Francois de Wet, a man who had spent years working alongside large corporations and their leadership teams and kept watching the same problem repeat itself. Hiring was broken — slow, expensive, and built for a world that no longer existed. De Wet built Wamly to fix that, and was later joined by entrepreneur and SA investor Marnus Broodryk, who brought the commercial instinct and network to match his deep domain expertise. Together with a team that carries extensive experience in recruitment, they have built a capital-efficient business that is growing internationally without losing its solution focus — a combination that is rarer than it sounds, and exactly the kind of dynamic we look for at Hlayisani.
The platform is more than a video interview tool. Wamly combines one-way video interviewing, applicant tracking, skills and psychometric assessments, and background checks into a single structured system — replacing the slow, subjective, inbox-managed chaos that passes for hiring in most organisations with a science-based process that works at any scale. A business hiring five people gets the same rigour as one hiring five thousand. The technology is now used to assess candidates across 147 countries.
The round lands at a moment when much of the public conversation about artificial intelligence is focused on job displacement. Wamly's conviction runs the other way. Across retail, logistics, contact centres, healthcare, hospitality, and frontline services, businesses still need to hire large numbers of people — and doing that well, at volume, remains one of the hardest, slowest, and most overlooked problems in business. Wamly's view is that AI's role in hiring is not to remove people from the process, but to make hiring people work better.
For HVF II, that framing is exactly the point. As Brett Commaille, Partner at Hlayisani Capital, put it: "Having the right people is still a critical need in any business. Wamly removes the vagueness of a challenging process and uses technology to make it work at scale. Hiring 5, 50 or 5000 people can now be done with the same rigour and successful outcome without the enormous drain on time and people. Wamly is precisely the kind of South African business we built this fund to support: real technology, solving a real problem, with the potential to win well beyond our borders."
We back technology-enabled businesses where software is not a feature but the foundation — companies where the model becomes more defensible as the platform matures and the data compounds. Wamly fits that precisely. It is not simply digitising an old process; it is rebuilding recruitment from the ground up with assessment science at its core and AI embedded across the hiring workflow.
There is also a mission at the heart of this business that we care about deeply. South Africa's unemployment rate remains among the highest in the world, and one of its most overlooked drivers is simply how long it takes to fill a job once one exists. Every day a vacancy sits open is a day someone is not earning. Wamly directly compresses that window, and that is not an afterthought — it is baked into the product's reason for being, and it aligns closely with why Hlayisani exists as a fund.
The new capital will be directed into three areas: deepening the product with further AI-driven capabilities across the hiring workflow, growing the team, and expanding into new international markets. As Francois de Wet puts it simply: "We've proven the model. Now we scale it."
We are proud to welcome Wamly to the Hlayisani portfolio, and to support a business that is not only commercially compelling, but genuinely changing how people find work.
