South African startup Conté, a creative agency and online magazine publisher, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from angel investors to allow it to grow its team and footprint.
Founded as a creative agency in November 2014, Conté launched its first magazine in May 2015. The funding coincided with its third issue last month.
Launched by Charmaine Ngobeni and Amanda Sibiya, the creative agency was designed to produce top-notch creative, artistic designs and multimedia solutions in various fields, such as website design and development, print design and graphic design. The magazine is a creative portfolio aimed at driving collaboration among artists.
Ngobeni told Disrupt Africa the founders had realised that as a growing company they were spending a lot of their own earnings from small jobs they were doing to stay afloat.
“This was becoming very difficult because we weren’t making most, if not half, of our earnings back. So we were encouraged to seek some funding to be able to keep the business moving and be able to pay ourselves the little we could,” she said.
The money, which was obtained after the startup pitched at a Venture Network event in Johannesburg, has been set aside to hire a team to market the business and make the business sustainable without regular cash injections from the founders.
