Itumeleng ‘Tumi’ Mphahlele is the chief operations officer at local lithium- ion battery manufacturer i-G3N (short for Innovation Generation, and pronounced ‘eye-gen’). Before becoming one of i-G3N’s three co-founders, she worked in the energy field as well as in corporate management. “I saw that the solar panel market was saturated,” she says, “while energy storage has enormous potential for growth.”

Mphahlele and her partners registered their business – black-empowered and women- owned – in 2018, and within a year, had produced their first battery prototypes. By September 2019, they were already looking for funding to get the business off the ground, but initially, this was hard to come by because investors in South Africa are generally risk-averse and shy away from early-stage or seed investments: they mostly only look at companies that are at least two years old. “Batteries need a lot of capital, and the development institutions we approached couldn’t help,” says Mphahlele, “but then we found Secha Capital.”