Barely a decade after he sold his Cape Town Internet security business Thawte Consulting to the US’s Verisign for US$575m, software billionaire Mark Shuttleworth has hit pay dirt again in this week’s acquisition by Visa of local mobile payments company Fundamo.

HBD (“Here Be Dragons”) Venture Capital, which Shuttleworth created in 2000 to channel some the fortune he made in the Versign deal into funding SA technology start-ups, is a significant minority investor in Fundamo, along with Remgro and Sanlam.

Shuttleworth is also the man behind Ubuntu, one of the world’s most popular Linux operating systems for desktop and server computers.

HBD owns 25,65% of Fundamo, meaning the venture capital firm will receive $28,2m, or R190m at the current rand-dollar exchange rate, from the all-cash acquisition by Visa.

Remgro, which holds 31,88% of Fundamo, walks away from the deal with a cool $35,1m, and Sanlam, with 27,32%, takes home $30,1m. It’s the biggest foreign investment in an SA technology company since last year’s R24,4bn all-cash acquisition of Dimension Data by Japan’s Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp.

Visa says the acquisition of Fundamo will help “accelerate the execution” of its global strategy, announced last month, to provide the “next generation of payment solutions, allowing customers to transact wherever and whenever they choose, using a card, computer or mobile device”.

Fundamo has more than 50 active mobile financial services deployments in about 40 countries, including 27 countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. — Duncan McLeod, TechCentral