Alongside Elon Musk, Vinny Lingham has risen as a South African-born American business entrepreneur in the famous Silicon Valley in San Francisco. His previous business Gyft, which sold electronic gift vouchers, shot to popularity after it began to accept Bitcoins. After California-based First Data acquired Gyft in 2014, for over $50m, Lingham– a serial entrepreneur– has since turned out to be known as the ‘Bitcoin Oracle’ for his accurate forecasts of developments in the cryptocurrency space.
Lingham is the founder of Yola Inc, a San Francisco-based web 2.0 outfit that provides site building, publishing and hosting services to more than 3 million active clients over the globe. Yola has pulled over $30 million in venture capital from institutional investors including, Columbus Venture Capital, a subsidiary of South African billionaire Johann Rupert’s Richemont Group. Before Yola, Lingham established Click2Customers, a hugely useful search engine marketing company with workplaces in London, Cape Town, and Los Angeles. Click2Customers rounds up to about $100 million in yearly revenues. Lingham is a co-founder of the Silicon Cape Initiative alongside kindred South African entrepreneur Justin Stanford.
Vinny Lingham is at present the cofounder and CEO of Civic Technologies Inc a new business that has an objective to eliminate fraud, authorize new accounts, and anticipate identity theft. This takes place on an “Identity Network” where customers can verify their identity in real time with participating merchants and vendors. He has recently raised $2.75 million in venture funding driven by eminent investor Social Leverage.
Vinny is likewise the cofounder of SiliconCape.com, an NGO situated in South Africa that intends to transform Cape Town into a technology hub. Vinny is an active technology investor fundamentally in Silicon Valley. He additionally partnered with one of his past cofounders to set up an investment fund in South Africa, called Newtown Partners, where he has driven early-stage investment fund into fruitful and remarkable new businesses, like Sweep South in South Africa.
He has also shown up as a Dragon on the South African release of Dragon’s Den, the longest running UK investment reality show on television, where entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to secure venture capital from a board of venture capitalists.
