There is a detail in Jed da Silva’s story that most founder profiles overlook. Before he started building companies, he was studying why people hesitate to start them.
In 2018, while at the University of Cape Town’s School of Management Studies, da Silva co-authored a peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Entrepreneurship Education. The research examined why university students avoid entrepreneurship, identifying three key barriers: perceived risk, perceived innovative capacity, and the absence of institutional support.
The paper has since been cited by researchers at the University of Kent and Tshwane University of Technology, contributing to ongoing academic discussions around entrepreneurial participation. In retrospect, it reads almost like a blueprint for what came next. Da Silva was analysing the psychological barriers to entrepreneurship while unknowingly preparing to confront them himself.
Solving the data gap
South Africa does not lack consumer data. What it lacks is honest data.
Retailers and consumer goods companies spend billions trying to understand purchasing behaviour, yet large portions of the economy remain invisible to traditional analytics systems. Informal traders, wholesale purchases and cash transactions often fall outside formal datasets.
Working from offices between Cape Town and Amsterdam, da Silva and his team began asking a simple question: what if consumers were rewarded for sharing their shopping behaviour directly?
The answer became Maholla.
The concept was deceptively simple. Users scan any receipt, from any store, and receive instant rewards such as airtime. Behind that mechanic sat a much larger ambition: building one of the largest, most detailed independent datasets of consumer purchasing behaviour in emerging markets.
While global tech companies and Silicon Valley entities have spent years capturing attention through advertising, Maholla approached the digital economy from a different angle, rewarding participation rather than extracting it.
The dataset that made headlines
Early adoption was promising. But it was a single dataset that pushed the startup into the national spotlight.
In early 2023, Maholla analysed more than half a million scanned receipts across South Africa. The results were striking. Average consumer basket sizes had declined by 23.7% year-on-year between February 2022 and February 2023 (at the time, the platform was already tracking millions of purchases each month, approaching the transaction volume of some of South Africa’s largest supermarket chains).
The finding offered one of the clearest real-time indicators of the country’s cost-of-living pressure at supermarket tills.
The data quickly became a reference point across national business and news media. For a startup less than two years old, it was an unusual moment: a private platform producing economic insight that established newsrooms treated as a primary source.
At the time, da Silva made a bold prediction. “Our company is en route to tracking as many purchases as a top five retailer in South Africa.”
As the dataset expanded, the statement began to look less like ambition and more like a trajectory.
Investor confidence
In April 2023, Maholla secured a $1.5m seed round, bringing total funding to more than $2m following a $580,000 pre-seed raise in July 2022. Backers included Buffet Group, Castleton Capital, Praesidium Capital Management and Galloprovincialis. The investment signalled growing confidence that Maholla had developed a new model for large-scale consumer participation.
One metric stood out. Maholla’s 30-day user retention reached 77%, nearly double the benchmark for media and entertainment apps and more than twice the average for e-commerce platforms.
The figures pointed to a clear conclusion. Consumers are willing to participate in the data economy, provided the value exchange is transparent.
The pivot that went global
From the beginning, da Silva believed the underlying principle of rewarding digital participation could travel far beyond retail data. The breakthrough came through gaming.
By partnering with publishers including Playtika and Moon Active (the studio behind the global hit Coin Master) Maholla built a rewards layer that allows players to earn real-world benefits simply by playing games they already enjoy.
The strategy produced two new platforms: Playstorm, a hyper-casual gaming rewards ecosystem for international audiences, and Points Castle, a gamified rewards platform designed for emerging markets.
Together with Maholla, the products form what da Silva describes as an app studio: a portfolio of earning platforms designed for different audiences and regions.
Today, the ecosystem serves more than one million users across 73 countries, with over 200 games and partners integrated into the platform.
The United States has become one of the fastest-growing markets, evidence that incentive-driven participation is not limited to emerging economies.
It is simply human behaviour.
A theory playing out in real time
What makes da Silva unusually exceptional as a founder, is the consistency of the idea behind everything he has built. His academic research explored why people hesitate to participate in systems they perceive as risky. Maholla applied that thinking to the data economy, asking a simple question: why do consumers generate valuable behavioural data without receiving anything in return?
Playstorm and Points Castle extend the same logic into gaming, rewarding users for the engagement data they create. The principle is straightforward. Align incentives, remove friction, and participation follows.
73 countries later, the theory appears to be holding up remarkably well.
