Dacod Magagula

Dacod Magagula is Co-Founder and CEO/CTO of FoondaMate, a WhatsApp-based AI education platform serving over 4 million students across 180 countries. A University of Cape Town computer science graduate (2014-2017), he grew up attending under-resourced schools in rural Mbombela, South Africa, where he was the first student from his school accepted to UCT. After dropping out due to financial constraints, he worked as a full-stack developer at Monetise E-commerce (2017-2019) and ninety9cents (2019-2021). He co-founded FoondaMate in 2020 with Tao Laine Boyle to democratize access to educational resources via low-data messaging platforms. The startup has raised $2 million in seed funding and expanded from South Africa to Nigeria and Southeast Asia. He was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe Social Impact 2025.