Zachariah (Zach) George is the founder & managing director of Cactus Advisors - a specialist corporate finance, investment and business advisory firm based in Cape Town, South Africa. In 2015, Cactus Advisors created, developed and managed the first ever corporate tech accelerator program in Africa – the Barclays Tech Lab Africa program designed to discover, nurture and empower the next generation of technology innovators on the African continent, and subsequently managed the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation’s incubator and accelerator program. Zach has advised numerous African start-ups and SMEs and is a co-Managing Director for Startupbootcamp Africa – one of the world’s leading accelerator programs. From 2011 to 2014, Zach led the Africa operations of U-Start - a Swiss based global investment advisory firm specializing in direct and indirect venture capital investments in the tech and digital sector for private investors (family offices and high net-worth Individuals) as well as VC funds, corporate ventures and wealth management institutions.

Zach was formerly an Asst Vice President at two of the largest bulge bracket Wall Street firms in New York - Lehman Brothers and Barclays Capital - where he worked as an investment banker covering Mergers and Acquisitions, IPOs, Risk Management and Strategic Corporate Finance. In May 2010, he voluntarily left the global financial sector and moved to Africa where he spent a year consulting to micro-finance organizations and impact-driven venture capital enterprises, including a 6-month stint as a Professor of Finance for an Ashoka award winning Social Entrepreneurship MBA program in Nairobi. Since August 2011, Zach has been based in Cape Town where he is a specialist business consultant and financial advisor to senior management teams at corporations, banks, financial institutions, impact investment funds and enterprise development institutions. In 2014, Zach was recognized as a Certified Business Adviser at the Institute of Business Advisers for Business Advising Excellence and is a member of the Institute of Directors in Southern Africa (IoDSA). He has been featured on CNBC Africa on several occasions as well as on Entrepreneur Magazine and Cliff Central.

Prior to his Wall Street career, at the age of 22, Zach got his Master’s degree in Management Science from Stanford University, California specializing in Corporate Finance. During the course of his degree, he was invited by the United Nations Secretariat to work on U.N. projects for the Department of Management and Procurement in New York. Zach is a Mechanical Engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology.

He has lived and worked in the Middle East, California, New York, India, South Africa and Kenya. Outside of his professional life, Zach is an acoustic guitarist/vocalist with a country folk acoustic cover album on iTunes released in 2010. He loves art and theater as well as the adventure and outdoor junkie, having most recently run the New York and Cape Town marathon and summited Mt. Kilimanjaro. Zach, his wife, and three children live in the coastal town of Kommetjie on the southern peninsula of Cape Town.