Luke Kannemeyer
Chief Operating Officer in Cape Town, South Africa
I'm Luke. As COO, I currently manage our international expansion, operations and business intelligence of one of Africa's fastest-growing companies, SweepSouth, an online platform and app for ordering and paying for home services within a few minutes.
Over my 7 years of senior management experience in technology start-ups, I have managed the editing and publication of digital textbooks as well as built and rapidly scaled operations in a logistically complex and slow economic growth environment.
My background is in scientific research whereafter I joined ed-tech startup, Siyavula Education in 2013. I spent two years working in mathematics and natural science education where I managed the community editing and publication of digital textbooks by a team of internal employees and hundreds of volunteers.
I became Mandela Rhodes Scholar in 2011 and in the following year, I won the award for Most Outstanding Postgraduate Leader at the University of Cape Town (South Africa).
I joined SweepSouth as a shareholder and first employee shortly after its launch in Cape Town in March 2015. I started work in a dining room as the two founders and myself. Since then, we have grown our operations to an employee count of over 40 and a contractor base exceeding 25 000.
At SweepSouth, we connect professional, experienced and insured service providers with homeowners, and in doing so bring technology to an industry that has remained unchanged for decades. We are also passionate about helping to address unemployment in South Africa by connecting domestic work professionals with work opportunities. For our customers, we provide a convenient, easy and trusted service to care for their homes, so they can do better things with their time.
Since SweepSouth became the first SA startup to join Silicon Valley’s 500 Startups in 2015, we have enjoyed extensive media coverage in Forbes, TechCrunch, Fast Company, Medium.com, Disrupt Africa and most of South Africa's leading newspapers and tech blogs as well as SABC News and eNCA.
This report by the BBC for their African Business Report in 2017 offers a glimpse into the work we do at SweepSouth.