Aisha R. Pandor is co-founder and CEO of SweepSouth, Africa’s first online end to-end platform for booking, managing and paying for home cleaning services. Aisha is one of very few black female tech startup CEOs both in South Africa and internationally, and has led SweepSouth to become one of the fastest-growing startups in the country. Venture-backed, SweepSouth won the SiMODiSA Startup SA pitching prize and later became the first South African startup to be accepted into the prestigious 500 Startups accelerator based in Silicon Valley in San Francisco.

Aisha is a former scientist who completed her PhD in Human Genetics at the University of Cape Town. While writing her PhD thesis, she also completed a Postgraduate Business Administration course at the University of Cape Town, coming first in class in that course and becoming the first student to graduate from the University with two separate qualifications from two different faculties, on the same day. Following her studies, she went on to work as a management consultant at Accenture South Africa. There she advised clients on HR management, digital strategy and supply chain management (managing hundreds of millions of dollars in operational expenditure) in the telecommunications and mining industries. During her time at the company, she was ranked among the top three in her peer group in the EMEA region.

After 2 years as a consultant, Aisha decided to bite the bullet and embark on an entrepreneurial journey with SweepSouth, an on-demand tech platform for booking domestic services that connects unemployed and
underemployed domestic workers with homeowners who need their services. Her company launched in June 2014 and currently operates in 4 South African cities, providing work opportunities for thousands of women.

As a student, Aisha received a David and Elaine Potter Fellowship as well as various research scholarships from the NRF and MRC. Having published her research work in an international peer-reviewed journal, Aisha is the recipient of a South African Women in Science Award, was named as one of the Mail and Guardian’s Top 200 Young South Africans in 2012, and was featured in Forbes Africa in 2016 as a top African millennial. More recently, Aisha has acted as a tech startup pitching coach and mentor for SeedStars Africa 2017, and was awarded the Price Check Female Entrepreneur of the year award and Black Entrepreneur of the year award for 2016.