Mponeng Seshea: Winner of the 2025 Great Companies International Women Entrepreneur Award
- Great Companies
- Apr 7
- 3 min read
Name: Mponeng Seshea
Business Name: iEvolution Social Venture Studio
Location: cape town , South Africa
Category: Venture Studio
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/imizizi_evolution/
Company Detail:
IEvolution is an impact venture studio that supports the development of women and their businesses in hard to reach places and with a unique servicing offering for the real economy. The process is discovery and assessment of women ventures, developing and supporting through a program, practical hands on workshops and investment ready prep events.
They craft new businesses and scale young ones through creativity, collaboration, and craftsmanship, immersing themselves in their teams to guide them towards financial independence and growth. They use the venture studio to break barriers and bridge gaps while resuscitating uBuntu.
They go through an Involution process with the founders and projects, fostering creativity, teamwork, and excellence, engaging them deeply to build, resilient ventures that contribute to a more equitable and prosperous society.
Unique Selling Proposition or Competitive Advantage:
Their mission is to shift the current poverty cycle to a prosperity cycle in Africa, and at its core, this requires a mindset shift.
They reach the untapped and undeveloped businesses in the “hard to reach” areas and propel their growth while exposing them to more opportunities to take them further.
They seek scalable businesses with a strong founding team, a commitment to solving real-world problems, and the potential to offer attractive returns.
Challenges Faced During the Journey:
iEvolution is a passion business born from the need they saw and encountered while growing Imzizi - a People Management Advisory company. The potholes and pitfalls of not knowing enough and the resulting fear of the unknown, not being connected and the resulting lack of access or opportunities is a journey they had to face.
Economical factors like covid that can never be planned for taught them to pull the carpet from under their feet and be ready for the unexpected. Large corporates taking advantage of the fear of losing a client by requesting unfair terms, industry regulations that require them to relook at their operating model, people issues and the continued battle of work life balance and learning to have boundaries empathetically. What they wanted the most was to teach other women from their lessons learnt so they can avoid as much as possible some of the mistakes they made.
Women entrepreneurs in South Africa, particularly those operating in the real economy and hard to reach areas face systematic and structural barriers that stifle their growth, limit their access to funding and prevent them from realizing their full economic potential. Despite being recognized as powerful economic drivers, women remain an untapped force due to deep rooted inequalities in investment, development opportunities and business support structures.
Advice for Women Entrepreneurs:
It's a journey, both of the business and the self. As the business grows, it requires more from them and of them, because it is evolving. This requires a different version of them each time.
They need to evolve with the business and beyond it. Be comfortable with not knowing and be a student for life. Growth mindset is what will get them through. They call it the ABCs of growth mindset - Always be Curious, because curiosity opens up to creative thinking and problem solving.
Never forget their passion and their reason for having started, the reason for the conceptual idea and continue to evolve to be the person that brings that vision true.
Running a business will require a lot out of them, remembering why they started is one of the fires that keep them going. There is a reason they started. That Idea was theirs to see it through. Do it. Do it scared, Do it unsure, but do it, Their way.
