By Shruti Menon Seeboo
When the 6th India-Africa Entrepreneurship & Investment Summit convenes in Cape Town from 13 to 15 July, the conversation around innovation on the African continent will extend well beyond software and apps. For Thaheer Mullins, Partner at Savant and Founder of Dala For Africa — and a recipient of the Forttuna Global Excellence Award 2025 in the Visionary of the Year category — the real opportunity lies in the hardware, the engineering, and the physical infrastructure that underpins everything else. Rising from an impoverished township in South Africa to become one of the continent’s most active deep-tech venture capital investors and corporate innovation programme managers, Mullins today facilitates deal sourcing, structuring, and portfolio support spanning market entry, scaling, grants, and equity investments. With a 20-year track record at Savant across venture capital, incubation, acceleration, and corporate innovation, and an angel syndicate focused exclusively on African ventures, he arrives at this year’s Summit with a clear-eyed view of what the India-Africa innovation corridor must look like if it is to deliver real, lasting impact.
The starting point, for Mullins, is capital. Deep-tech and science-driven startups remain chronically underfunded across the continent compared to their software counterparts, and he is direct about what needs to change. “To attract more investment into African deep-tech and hardware, we need a shift toward patient capital and strategic cross-border partnerships,” he says. “Software offers rapid scaling, but hardware solves fundamental infrastructure gaps.” The structural opportunity, he argues, is enormous and still largely untapped. “Eighteen African countries have built and launched only 69 indigenous satellites for 1.4 billion people, whereas India’s ISRO has hundreds of satellites serving foreign customers,” he points out. The solution, in his view, lies in manufacturing joint ventures across sectors such as space, point-of-care medical diagnostics, and cold chain logistics. “Blending India’s proven engineering scale with Africa’s high-growth demand will build investor confidence in our deep-tech potential,” he says.
On the question of what a genuinely useful India-Africa innovation corridor looks like in practice, Mullins is equally unambiguous — and characteristically direct. “Usefulness requires execution. You need to ‘dala’ — do,” he says. “A corridor should bridge India’s complementary technology and expertise with Africa’s critical resources and fast-growing consumer markets, addressing shared development challenges with proven solutions.” The most immediate opportunities, he identifies, lie in the localisation of Digital Public Infrastructure and artificial intelligence, with African nations adapting India’s highly successful UPI and Aadhaar frameworks to their own contexts. He also points to healthcare and logistics as sectors of massive potential. “We can establish generic drug manufacturing joint ventures and implement Indian cold chain logistics models to unlock the three-point-four trillion dollar AfCFTA single market,” he says, adding that this approach achieves “constructive local economic beneficiation while India still enjoys core upside.”
Technical talent retention is another area where Mullins challenges conventional thinking. Africa produces over 650,000 STEM graduates annually, yet retaining them on the continent remains one of its most persistent challenges. His prescription moves beyond the familiar call for more jobs. “Fundamentally, STEM graduates are often not equipped to become business owners,” he says. “Governments and corporates need to coalesce around entrepreneurship development centres to build the business acumen of these graduates. We don’t need to keep finding jobs for graduates — we need them to create jobs or be independent operators.” He also advocates for India-Africa IT delivery centres that leverage what he describes as Africa’s unique talent-cost and timezone advantages, alongside scaled-up Indian coding bootcamp franchises that align local skillsets with global standards.
For African founders pitching to venture capitalists, Mullins identifies a recurring and costly mistake. “A common mistake African founders make is over-indexing on the idea of international success, while underestimating the rigorous execution, distribution and cross-border scale required for it,” he says. “Many fail to demonstrate a clear path to navigating infrastructure constraints.” It is precisely here that the India-Africa Entrepreneurship Forum, and the IA HCC platform it supports, can make a transformative difference. “By facilitating B2B matchmaking, delegation support, knowledge transfer and cross-border joint ventures, the forum exposes founders to Indian entrepreneurs who have successfully scaled in similar environments,” he says. “This builds a generation of highly resilient, better-prepared founders ready to capture outsized returns.”
As Cape Town prepares to host one of the continent’s most significant entrepreneurship and investment gatherings, Mullins represents a strand of thinking that is as practical as it is ambitious — one that sees Africa not as a market waiting to be served, but as an innovation powerhouse waiting to be unleashed.
