Most founders talk about changing the world. Jed da Silva started by renting out school lockers, which is exactly why he’s worth paying attention to. Years later, the same instincts about incentives would underpin a consumer technology platform used by more than a million people across 70 countries.
Long before venture capital, term sheets, or partnerships with multibillion-dollar gaming publishers, Jed da Silva was running micro-businesses in a school corridor. He rented lockers to classmates. Produced event media for school functions. Small ventures, perhaps, but hardly trivial.

What da Silva was doing, though he did not yet have the language for it, was running early experiments in consumer behaviour and incentive design. Who pays for convenience? What persuades someone to choose your product over doing nothing at all? And how do you design something that creates value for both sides of a transaction?

Those questions never left him. They simply grew in scale.

From the schoolyard to the boardroom

Da Silva later studied at the University of Cape Town, where his interest in the mechanics of participation became formalised. There, he co-authored a peer-reviewed paper on entrepreneurial intention in the Journal of Entrepreneurship Education, examining what prevents people from backing themselves economically when the opportunity is right in front of them.

The research identified three core barriers: perceived risk, perceived innovative capacity, and whether the surrounding system feels supportive or hostile to new ventures. That framework would later echo through the design of the platforms da Silva built.

In retrospect, the framework reads almost like a product brief. Each company da Silva has since built  addresses those same variables. Reduce the perceived risk. Make the value clear. Design systems where participation feels natural rather than effortful.

Building something the market actually needed

When da Silva co-founded Maholla in 2021, the idea was simple: scan any receipt, from any store, and earn rewards. No loyalty card required. No retailer partnership necessary. No minimum spend. Just a receipt, a smartphone, and a few seconds.

The simplicity was deliberate. South Africa’s retail landscape is fragmented across formal chains, wholesalers, informal traders and spaza shops. Most loyalty programmes are siloed, rewarding shoppers for spending within a single retailer’s ecosystem rather than for shopping itself.

Maholla took a different approach. The platform was designed to be retail-agnostic, allowing it to capture something no single retailer could: a broad, unfiltered, independent view of what South African consumers were actually buying and where they were buying it.

That data quickly proved valuable. When Maholla published a basket-size analysis drawn from more than half a million scanned receipts in early 2023, it revealed a 23.7% year-on-year decline in consumer spending (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 findings offered a ground-level signal of the country’s cost-of-living pressures and quickly became a headline point of reference across the national business and news media. A startup barely two years old had produced economic intelligence that some of the country’s largest newsrooms were treating as primary source material.

The capital that followed

The market responded. Maholla raised a $580,000 pre-seed round in July 2022, followed by a $1.5 million seed round in April 2023, bringing total funding to more than $2 million. The investor base included senior figures with deep experience in global consumer goods and retail, signalling that the industry recognised both the commercial value of the platform and the insight it was generating.

The product’s performance metrics reinforced the case. At the time of the seed raise, Maholla’s 30-day user retention stood at 77%, a figure that benchmarked well above comparable categories across mobile, including media, e-commerce and gaming.

Users were not simply downloading the app. They were returning consistently because the reward was tangible and the friction required to participate was minimal.

The bigger swing

What da Silva has done since is the part of the story many observers have not yet fully caught up with. Recognising that the core mechanic of his model - earning tangible rewards for digital participation - was not uniquely South African and could extend far beyond retail data, he chose to expand the concept into gaming (one of the largest engagement markets in the digital economy).

Partnerships with global publishers, including Playtika and Moon Active, the globally recognised studio behind Coin Master, provided the infrastructure to reward players for time spent in games they were already playing. Two new apps followed: Playstorm, a hyper-casual gaming loyalty platform, and Points Castle, a gamified rewards product designed for emerging markets.

Da Silva often describes the model as part of a broader “participation economy,” where users earn value from the data and engagement they generate online.

The result is a consumer app studio operating in 73 countries, serving more than one million users, with over 200 games and partners integrated across the platform. The United States has emerged as one of its fastest-growing markets. What began with scanned grocery receipts in Cape Town now competes on a global stage.

The schoolyard entrepreneur who once discovered that classmates would pay for the convenience of a locker has spent his career asking the same question at increasing scale: what makes participation feel worthwhile?

The answer, it seems, now spans 73 countries.

Jed da Silva is a technology entrepreneur focused on consumer apps combining entertainment, rewards, and data-driven engagement.