Dov Girnun

Dov Girnun

Entrepreneur, Dov Girnun founded Merchant Capital in 2012 with start-up funding of R3-million. Since then, the Johannesburg based fintech company has enabled the growth of South African SMEs by providing over R2-billion worth of quick, simple access to unsecured working capital.

He began his formal career in London’s financial industry until his ambitions to own a business brought him back home to South Africa.

Merchant Capital was created to provide funding in the largely underserviced small business finance sector. Girnun created a business model with his founding partners to address this challenge.  The fintech provides qualifying merchants with an upfront lump sum in the form of a cash advance in exchange for a small fixed percentage of future turnover.

The dynamic CEO has since grown the South African business to take on an industry leading position that has now helped close to 10 000 small businesses. Most recently, the business has been recognised on an international stage, being named Best Small Business Funding Solution in South Africa in the UK-based Wealth & Finance magazine’s 2020 FinTech Awards.

“The biggest impediment to growth as an entrepreneur is access to finance, my team really wanted to change that landscape for South African entrepreneurs. Merchant Capital is based on the challenges we’ve all personally experienced as entrepreneurs.”

Girnun has attended both Harvard Business School and Stanford University, and is now the Entrepreneur in Residence at GIBS (Gordon Institute of Business Science) for the MBA Entrepreneurship Focus Programme. He is also founding member of SASFA (South African SME Finance Association), founded to promote a fair and transparent SME Finance Industry and to protect SME’s from unscrupulous players in the market. SASFA has published a code of conduct on its roles and responsibilities in order to protect its customers, and ensure the industry does not fall into the same traps as micro-lenders.