LinkedIn·Friday, 21 August 2026·5d ago

There are hires that fill a position. And there are hires that make you feel your company has reached another stage. Dawid Swart CA(SA)…

Steven Backer

Founder & CEO, Afriwise | Pan-African Legal Data and Legal Tech | AI-Powered Compliance

There are hires that fill a position. And there are hires that make you feel your company has reached another stage. Dawid Swart CA(SA) joined Afriwise as CFO last week. It is one of the nicest compliments you can get as a founder when a smart, experienced person looks closely at what you are building and decides that they want to become part of it. Building Afriwise has meant years of figuring things out, changing course, adding content, products, customers and people, twice even bringing in entire teams, integrate, adapt and inevitably building some complexity along the way. At a certain point, as a founder, you realise that what got you here won't necessarily get you where you want to go next. That's where Dawid comes in. What I liked from our very first discussions was that he isn't interested in being the person who sits somewhere in Finance telling everyone else what the numbers say. He wants to understand the business. The products, the customers. How we sell. How we deliver. Where things work. Where they don't. How we intend to adapt to the fastlt evolving legal realities. And then help us build a much stronger company around all of it. It helps that Dawid has built and co-founded businesses, worked alongside founders through periods of rapid growth, and knows first-hand that scaling a company is rarely as neat as the spreadsheets eventually make it look. He has also spent years helping entrepreneurial businesses professionalise, raise capital and scale, without losing sight of the commercial reality underneath the numbers. That combination matters enormously. And he certainly hit the ground running. His first week was a pretty intense handover and immersion into all things Afriwise, perhaps more Afriwise in five days than anyone should reasonably be exposed to. 😄 But I already like the questions he is asking. We have big ambitions for Afriwise. And getting the right people around the table for the next stage matters enormously. Dawid, very, very happy to have you at that table. A warm welcome to Afriwise. #WeAreAfriwise