Media Release: Minister Winde congratulates CT tech start-up on their success

Locally based tech firm HyperionDev has received venture capital funding which will allow them to expand their Cape Town operations, and grow their team by up to 200 people.

The funding will also see the company, which is headquartered in the UK, but operating out of Cape Town, rebrand to CoGrammar.

The company hit the headlines when it won Facebook’s 2016 Innovation Challenge, securing $230 000 in funding. It has also received grants from Google and Python. HyperionDev is an online coding bootcamp providing one-on-one mentorship which allows students to start a career in software development in under six months. The coding bootcamp product will continue to be known as HyperionDev, but the company will rebrand as CoGrammar.

It became the largest online coding bootcamp in Africa, and the company has since scaled it to 40 other countries.

The new round of funding is most exciting because it will allow CoGrammar to introduce an entirely new career path: copywriter for code. These are individuals who are trained to conduct rapid human review of students’ code- to check that it is not just correct, but fluent and at a level concurrent with industry standards.

Minister of Economic Opportunities, Alan Winde said: “We’ve just recently seen a report that Cape Town is home to the most thriving tech start-up industry in Africa, and companies like CoGrammar are precisely the kinds of start-ups that have earned us this accolade. We’ve also just seen this week that Cape Town has overtaken Johannesburg as the country’s new financial hub in the Global Financial Centres Index, which presents some really exciting opportunities for us in the fin-tech space.”

“We congratulate CoGrammar on this funding milestone and wish them well as they expand in our province. This company is using innovation to not only narrow the skills gap in the tech industry, but to create actual new job descriptions. We welcome the news that their team, the majority of whom are based in Cape Town, will be recruiting and expanding, creating valuable jobs in our province,” Minister Winde said.

CoGrammar’s first recruitment drive for Copywriters for Code is currently active. Those wishing to apply can access more information at www.cogrammar.com