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knock
opportunity infrastructure
Category 5 · Innovative Industries
EDHE Absa InnoVarsity 2026
South Africa's opportunity infrastructure

The infrastructure for opportunity.

Building the infrastructure that routes industry opportunity to the doors of student talent.

🎓 Student talent 🏢 Industry 📱 WhatsApp-native
STEM Student
transcript verified
the opportunity layer
Bursaries
Careers
Skills dev
knock
opportunity infrastructure
Our North Star
it only takes one
One opportunity can change a life.We help it find student talent.
An internship · a bursary · a graduate programme · a first job
knock
opportunity infrastructure
The Problem
Opportunities exist — they are not reaching students

Two sides. One broken connection.

🎓 Students
Can't efficiently find the right opportunities.
Scattered across LinkedIn, portals, WhatsApp groups, word-of-mouth — fragmented and dependent on luck.
the
missing layer
🏢 Industry
Can't efficiently find the right talent.
Heavy spend on recruitment and outreach — with no way to measure if it reaches the talent they want.
Overlooked talent isn't just inefficiency — it's lost economic potential, reduced social mobility, and slower progress on SDG 4, 8 & 10.
knock
opportunity infrastructure
The Solution
We don't make students search. We make opportunities find them.

Opportunities find students — through WhatsApp.

🎓

For students

Relevant, verified opportunities delivered directly to their door, on their terms. The time spent searching is now used to decide which opportunities best fit their career paths.
🏢

For industry

Something outreach can't give them: visibility. Who engaged, what they did, and whether their investment reached the talent they want.
Better outcomes for students create better outcomes for employers — impact and commercial value, mutually reinforcing.
knock
opportunity infrastructure
Product Vision
An intelligence layer between industry and emerging talent — building a sustainable relationship between education & private sector

Three layers. One infrastructure.

1

Discovery & Access

Helping opportunities reach the right students at the right time.

Pilot now
2

Engagement & Analytics

Visibility into student engagement, outreach performance, and talent pipeline effectiveness.

Next
3

Trusted Data Layer

A destination for recurring compliance spend — bursaries, B-BBEE — with the verifiable reporting industry needs.

Roadmap
Today's pilot focuses on Layer 1 — but it's designed to unlock the analytics and trust infrastructure organisations need over time.
knock
opportunity infrastructure
Market Opportunity
Start focused. Expand by design.

A focused entry — into a market that compounds.

The expansion path · market opportunity
Beachhead · Now
UCT, Wits, Stellies, UP, UWC · STEM
R80M
~$4.3M
Active
Next · All faculties
All 26 SA universities · STEM
R1.2B
~$65M
Year 1
SA Student Lifecycle
All disciplines + SDL compliance layer
R5B+
~$270M+
Year 2
Africa TAM
Graduate talent markets across Africa
R305B
USD 16.5B
Year 3+
26
SA Universities · near-zero marginal cost per institution added
3
Scaling axes: Universities → Faculties → Student lifecycle
Africa staffing market: Research & Markets 2023 (USD 16.5B, 8.7% CAGR) · SA SDL: DHET 2023 · SA enrolment: HEMIS 2023 (1.07M students, 319k in SET) · All market figures estimated bottom-up
Unit Economics & Scalability
Cost to service one student/month — drops with scale
R62
50 students
R28
100
R8.46
500
R5.95
1,000
R3.69
10,000
Fixed costs (R2,514/mo) don't grow with student count — adding the next student costs almost nothing extra.
65%
Gross margin by Month 6
2 drops
= break-even (R6k/month)
Zero-CAC flywheel: Students are already on WhatsApp. Peers invite the next class. The graduating cohort inherits the platform — student acquisition cost trends to R0 as Knock embeds in campus culture.
knock
opportunity infrastructure
Why Us
We've lived both sides of this market

We've already been paid to do this — by hand.

We ran the manual version — and it worked
As exec of the UCT Developer Society, we connected industry to students by hand across Cape Town's tech ecosystem. Knock is that, systematised and at scale. We've already built trust on both sides of this market.
ElectrumEntelectBBDFNBRMBStandard BankAWS
D
Dylan Tasdhary
Product · Architecture
Allan Gray Fellow · UCT MPhil FinTech
C
Chipo Chidakwa
Operations · Sales
Venture Experience · MCom Info Systems
4
IS Honours Team
4 developers · building the MVP now
Verification · intent-tracking · analytics
knock
opportunity infrastructure
Our Ask
What we're looking for

Partners who share the vision.

🎓University partners
🏢Industry opportunity partners
💜Strategic mentors & supporters
Because opportunity shouldn't depend on
who you know
where you studied
seeing the right post at the right time
It only takes one opportunity.
We help it find you.
Thank you.
knock
opportunity infrastructure
Pilot Validation
Execution-first
What we're validating right now

Deliver opportunities through a channel students already use — and prove it works.

01
Validate demand
Do better-matched opportunities improve discovery, engagement and access?
02
Understand willingness to pay
A sales-led pilot to test our assumptions and find real pricing.
03
Build the network
Our most valuable long-term asset: a trusted, engaged student network.
Execution-first. We learn by building — validating demand and willingness to pay while growing the asset everything else depends on.
knock
opportunity infrastructure
Q&A Backup · Unit Economics
Source: financial_model.xlsx
Why the model gets better as we grow

Lean to start. Costs drop as students scale.

R10,000
Pilot upfront — self-funded bootstrap
R26,422
Total 6-month pilot burn
R43,900
Revenue in same pilot period
65%
Gross margin by Month 6
Cost per student as the network grows
R62
50
R28
100
R8.46
500
R5.95
1,000
R3.69
10,000
Break-even: 2 audience drops/month. Fixed costs (R2,514/mo) don't scale with students.

The zero-CAC campus flywheel

We don't spend to find students. We live on WhatsApp — students invite their peers, and the next class inherits the platform.

Built once. The infrastructure stays; the students cycle through it.

R500k ask: not to pay people for manual work — to buy the software that automates it away. Then adding a student costs almost nothing.
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