Know before
it expires.

Miense Mpasa is from Pretoria, Gauteng, and now builds out of Centurion. He did not set out to start a tech company. He set out to solve a problem that made him furious.

At 24, he was mugged and lost his ID and driver's licence. The loss itself was manageable. What followed was not: the slow process, the cost, and the realisation that there was no safe, private way to carry his own documents without putting the originals at risk again. One month later, he started building.

Sound engineering graduate from the Academy of Sound Engineering, turned international sales executive across real estate, marketing, FMCG, law, and recruitment. Self-taught developer: CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Python. He codes the product himself, which means every privacy decision in Zari Vault was made by the same person who felt the original problem.

The privacy position is not a brand angle. It is the premise. Zari Vault runs no ads and has no mechanism to monetise user information, because it was designed from the start without a server that receives your documents.

Ask him what the hardest part of building this has been and he does not say fundraising or distribution. He says the self-doubt, learning on the go, and being a solo founder without a network to lean on.

Mutable. Relentless. Unfinished.

Born in Johannesburg, raised in Pretoria, and now based in Cape Town, Katleho Mohlomi is not the product of a business school or a corporate ladder. He is the product of a decision made at 18: to skip university entirely and build something instead. He attended Cornwall Hill College before matriculating at Pretoria Boys High School. The day most of his peers were filling out university applications, he was registering Khari Moh Holdings.

His first real test came during COVID-19. While the world shut down, Katleho identified an opportunity, began selling masks, and entered radio interviews to talk about what he was doing and why. The money he made didn't go toward lifestyle. It went toward the financial markets he had been studying since age 14. That foundation became Millionaire Contracts: a sales optimisation firm with 31 active clients, helping businesses grow revenue and reach markets they never imagined accessible.

With limited prior exposure to the American market, he partnered with a US private equity firm managing a pool fund of approximately $50 million. He figured it out. That experience gave him a first-hand understanding of how the world is interconnected through finance, and why thinking beyond your geography is not optional for serious builders.

His conviction around data sovereignty is personal. As someone who has had his own data used against him, and who watched AI-driven exploitation make ordinary people increasingly vulnerable, Katleho understands viscerally why most people hate having their information harvested and sold for ad revenue. That shared frustration is part of why he joined Zari Vault at inception.

One in eight billion.