Nowadays, especially in the tech start-up game, investors are generally willing to throw money at ideas that have potential.

Land the tick of approval from NASA, though, with a side of financial backing from Johann Rupert and Nicky Oppenheimer, and you’ve clearly done very well.

Local start-up Snapt can be pretty pleased with their efforts, and they’ve now touched down in Silicon Valley, whilst retaining offices in London, Cape Town, and the home base of Jozi.

Moneyweb with the profile below:

When NASA wanted to phone home from outer space, a company it chose to help make the call was Snapt…

Snapt founder Dave Blakey [pictured below on his LinkedIn profile] was just 14 when, together with his father, he started a computer company that developed hardware to manage bandwidth. Now his company Snapt does much and more of the same thing – helping manage computer traffic, balance loads among servers and accelerate web flow – but in software format…

Snapt counts some of the world’s largest banks and e-commerce sites as its customers, where every tenth of a second that it takes a web page to load can cost billions a year in lost revenue, the founder said. He said he couldn’t disclose revenue or profit figures because they’re confidential…

As part of their Silicon Valley push, Snapt will be looking to raise an additional $15 million (around R212 million) in funding, with Rupert and Oppenheimer having invested as far back as 2011.

That’s not at all shabby when you consider that Blakey never completed high school, although he certainly had valid reasons:

Blakey dropped out of high school to learn computing from his father, who started a few technology companies that were eventually sold. The younger entrepreneur didn’t attend university or even get his high school matriculation certificate.

However, he says he did obtain the world’s youngest A+ computing certification at 11 and became the second-youngest Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer at 14. He says he’s not in a rush to sell Snapt.

“We’ve had a few offers, but we think we’re at the bottom of the mountain, not the top,” Blakey says. “If we did exit the business, I’d have to do something else like this because working is all I know.”

If Snapt keeps on going from strength to strength, you would imagine those offers will have a few extra zeros behind them in the not too distant future.

Solid effort, folks.

We’ll finish with a little demo of what exactly Snapt offers:

[source:moneyweb]