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South African HRTech startup Wamly has closed a $3.05 million (R50 million) Series A round led by Hlayisani Capital‘s Hlayisani Venture Fund II, giving one of the country’s fastest-growing HR technology businesses fresh capital to deepen its product and push further into international markets.
The new capital will go toward three priorities: expanding Wamly’s AI capabilities across the hiring workflow, growing the team, and entering new international markets. “We’ve proven the model. Now we scale it,” said Francois de Wet, an industrial psychologist who founded the company in 2018.
During his time advising large corporations and their leadership teams, De Wet kept encountering the same issue: hiring processes that were slow, costly and poorly suited to modern organisations. He built Wamly to address that gap and was later joined by entrepreneur and investor Marnus Broodryk, who added commercial expertise to de Wet’s specialist background.
The platform has grown well beyond a simple video-interviewing tool. It now combines one-way video interviews, applicant tracking, skills and psychometric assessments, and background checks into a single system, and is used to assess candidates in 147 countries.
Hlayisani calls Wamly a strong match for its investment approach, which centres around backing companies where software is the core of the business rather than an add-on, and where the underlying model strengthens as the platform and its data mature.
“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,” said Brett Commaille, Partner at Hlayisani Capital.
The firm also points to Wamly’s stance on artificial intelligence as distinct from the broader narrative around AI and job losses. Rather than removing people from hiring, Wamly’s technology is aimed at helping recruiters do the work better, a philosophy Hlayisani says aligns with its own investment thesis.
“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,” Commaille added.
There’s also a social dimension to the bet. Hlayisani notes that South Africa’s high unemployment rate is partly driven by how long it takes to fill open roles, and every extra day a vacancy sits unfilled is a day someone isn’t earning an income. Compressing that timeline sits at the centre of Wamly’s product rather than being incidental to it.
The investment adds Wamly to a small but growing Hlayisani Venture Fund II portfolio that already includes Spatialedge, Tractor Outdoor, and Cogitait. With a focus on South African technology companies with the potential to compete internationally, Hlayisani Capital sees Wamly as an opportunity to genuinely change how people find work.
