South African Minister’s daughter made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list

Lethabo Motsoaledi’s success as a technology start-up founder saw her named on the highly regarded Forbes 30 Under 30 List.

Motsoaledi is the co-founder and CTO of Voyc AI, pronounced voice, a technology company that uses advanced technology to monitor the work of call centre agents.

Her engineering background and movement into the technology space differ heavily from those of her father, Aaron, who is South Africa’s current Health Minister and former Minister of Home Affairs.

In 2015, Motsoaledi co-founded Voyc with Matthew Westaway, both of whom were UCT engineering graduates, after sharing their grievances about poor interactions with retailers’ contact centres.

The pair believed that the poor experiences were due to the fact that many large companies seemed not to care about their customers’ experiences.

Thus, they created a user experience agency to help companies better understand their customers’ problems.

The pair initially manually listened to and analysed customer calls. They then thought there had to be a solution that automatically analyses conversations and highlights key themes.

After finding nothing, the pair created the first version of Voyc, which could automatically analyse conversations.

After making it into the prestigious Techstars SAP.iO accelerator in Berlin, Germany, the pair realised that the fundamental issue facing contact centres was not a lack of customer care.

The pair saw that contact centre professionals do care. It was just a lack of time and capacity that prevented them from consistently managing every interaction. 

The centre’s quality assurance processes designed to deliver insights and improve operations were also manual and inefficient.

This saw randomly sampled calls selected and checked for compliance using Excel score sheets.

Motsoaledi and Westaway realised they could use their technology to help companies monitor 100% of their calls. Motsoaledi would serve as CTO, and Westaway would serve as CEO.

Success and recognition

Despite only officially being launched in 2018, Voyc has seen strong growth and is used by contact centres across South Africa and Europe.

The service is used to help customers find which customers need further assistance and which agents need additional training.

Voyc has set the goal of monitoring the calls of 200 million end customers. By 2023, it had helped monitor and screen over 11.6 million calls for its call centre clients over the prior year.

In its first five years, the company also raised $2.1 million from investors. The company also hit $700,000 of annual recurring revenue in 2022, with deals via Marquis Finance, Investec and Standard Bank.

The company’s clientele includes Momentum, the UK-based Hippo Motor Group, Assist Insurance Services, and Advantage Finance.

Due to the company’s early success, Motsoaledi was named to the highly coveted Forbes 30 under 30 List in 2023.

With Voyc based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, she was included in the European technology section.

Outside of Voyc, Motsoaledi was a co-founder and CEO of 3D Power, a 3D printing company that secured the distribution rights to the leading consumer 3D printing manufacturer Flashforge.

She was also a co-founder of Hello Baby, which offered an ultrasound 3D printing product. The company’s algorithm converted 4D Ultrasounds into 3D prints.

She also co-founded The Hourglass, which tracked the participation in corporate employee volunteerism programmes.

Prior to forming Voyc, Motsoaledi and Westaway, who are now married, ran their agency, which offered a full range of design services from user research to product testing.

Prior to being named on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 List, Motsoaledi was also named one of the 50 most inspiring women in technology in South Africa by the Non-profit organisation Inspiring Fifty.

The Non-Profit was an initiative of the Dutch Consulate General in Cape Town, which sought to find female role models in the male-dominated technology industry.

Motsoaledi has also been named a fellow by the Mandela Rhodes Foundation and the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation.