Currency SA was founded on the conviction that South Africa needs high-quality, independent financial journalism to drive economic transparency. Amplify South Africa, the accelerator run by the Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF) and funded by the International Fund for Public Interest Media (IFPIM), that helped launch Currency, provided the “cover” and mentorship that let the founders take the product to audiences early. Amplify also advocated that a “fairer future” in a country such as South Africa would require a more representative newsroom in a historically white-dominated financial press. A very modest grant was provided to hire journalists from previously disadvantaged backgrounds. Currency however proved to be among the rarest of unicorns: launched in September 2024, it had its first cash-positive month a year later, and in February 2026 was acquired by Apex Capital Partners for an undisclosed sum, said to make the founders’ nine unsalaried months feel worth it—and hailed as the country’s “first (single) major media investment in years”.
Apex Capital Partners bundled Currency with their other acquisitions, Financial Mail and Miningmx, to create the Financial Mail Group.
Currency’s founders—alumni of South Africa’s oldest business magazine, Financial Mail—left after a dispute with Arena Holdings, the title’s owner, having tried and failed to buy the Financial Mail outright. They built a rival instead, on reputations already made there. In its first three months the outlet earned R1 million (€53,000) in advertising and R145,600 (€7,700) in reader revenue. All of these figures read as modest from Europe, but in South Africa they were signs of a successful start-up. What ultimately changed the trajectory was an R3.675 million investment (€195,000)—all of it attributed to the founders’ “existing relationships.” It was a sum close to unheard of for an early-stage South African digital news start-up, in the continent’s most industrialised economy.
But in July 2026 a single photograph threatened to undo the triumph of it all. The newly merged newsrooms from the Financial Mail and Currency News released a photograph of the newsroom, uniformly white and mostly male, presented as featuring the “country’s top business journalists.” The South African National Editors’ Forum (SANEF) called it evidence of a “profound and unacceptable systemic failure.” Currency did not dispute it, promising to fix it. But that it could still happen in 2026, with so little awareness, is what angered so many.
In a 2006 report, SANEF described the conditions of leadership in news media in the country: white men had monopolised the industry’s top positions under apartheid, and some Black men, unwilling to challenge that arrangement, had since simply been let into the club—the two groups now conspiring to keep the front row at the trough for themselves. Twenty years later, SANEF’s Glass Ceilings 2026 report found the pattern operating with almost no modification.
Capital arrives already knowing what a newsroom is supposed to look like—an idea it inherited from the same industry that read whiteness and maleness as safety.
The market, left to its own instincts, has proven that it will not correct this on any reasonable timeline.
In its report, Catalysing Private Capital, International Media Support (IMS) lays out recommendations for building “a stronger pipeline of investable media enterprises,” complete with governance frameworks and impact metrics. MDIF’s Amplify programme, which supported Currency, is one of its flagship examples of what that pipeline looks like in practice. Across those recommendations and every case study, however, the socio-economics of gender and race are not named. Investability is treated as a purely technical category that ignores who already has the standing to walk through the door those criteria describe.
This is not a uniquely South African conundrum.
Europe’s independent news ventures owe much of their success to a founding team’s accumulated standing—a known editor, an intact newsroom, a proven record—“the closest thing to collateral a pre-revenue venture could have.” But “proven” and “known” are never benign categories in a country where access to reputation was rationed by law for most of the last century.
Tortoise Media closed a single funding round of £10 million; Pluralis runs on a €50 million fund built to keep European publishers out of hostile ownership. Currency’s R3.675 million—the best-case outcome for its most connected journalists, backed by a purpose-built accelerator, celebrated as the country’s first major media investment in years—would not register as a rounding error against either. The racialised allocation of capital within South Africa is one problem; how little capital reaches this part of the world at all is the other.
SembraMedia’s 2021 Inflection Points study of digital-native media across Latin America, Southeast Asia and Africa found that roughly a third of outlets surveyed had at least one woman founder, strikingly high against legacy ownership in the same markets, where women hold shares in print and broadcast titles as low as one percent. But the founder-diversity figure dropped noticeably when researchers isolated Africa alone, and the 2026 Glass Ceilings report showed that community publishers in South Africa found the same logic at the smallest scale: women who own small local titles are routinely passed over for advertising money even when their papers produce the original reporting, because, as one publisher put it, when money materialises, it goes to the men. This is what it means to say capital reproduces prejudice: not that individual financiers are bigots, but that left alone the same collateral logic, replicates a legacy that is unlikely to ensure the news media of the future is truly in the public interest.
Some version of a blended-capital fund that could direct patient money toward entities that distribute fact-based information in places like South Africa is essential. But in South Africa, as elsewhere, private capital must find a stomach for activism. Capital has never been neutral. And therein lies the opportunity.