Profile

Marcello is in charge of international expansion at Yoco, one of the leading African fintech startups. Yoco helps over 150,000 SMEs in South Africa thrive by helping them accept digital payments and manage their business with digital tools and services. In his role, he is tasked with expanding Yoco’s offering to SMEs outside of South Africa across the continent and beyond.

Before joining Yoco, Marcello served as Regional Manager for Africa at Seedstars World, an organization building networks and opportunities for entrepreneurs across 65 countries in emerging markets. In that role, he was responsible for building, fostering and connecting entrepreneurs and other stakeholders in startup ecosystems in over 20 African countries.

He worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs, corporates, investors and governments across the continent every year to study the ecosystems, facilitate investments and build bridges across the world. He facilitated local and international investments into high growth tech companies in Tanzania, South Africa, Rwanda, Nigeria and many more. Through his work in over 20 countries, he has gained valuable insights into startups, entrepreneurship, ecosystems and market trends across the African continent and across the world.

In previous roles, he lived and worked in Silicon Valley, Latin America, the Middle East and Europe which allows him to combine different perspectives and approaches from across the world around building successful global startup ecosystems. Much of his work has centred around building platforms for entrepreneurs to succeed and ways to give them access to market by working with corporates. In his role as a consultant, his focus was on corporate innovation, intrapreneurship and how startups and corporates can work together to form mutually beneficent partnerships