From Johannesburg to the Future of Finance, Warren Wheatley is redefining what capital can achieve. As the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Africa Bitcoin Corporation Limited, formerly known as Altvest Capital, Warren has built more than a financial services company; he has shaped a bold platform designed to challenge conventional ideas about access to capital, SME growth, and wealth creation. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa, Africa Bitcoin Corporation combines private credit with a strategic Bitcoin treasury model, creating a distinctive approach to financing African entrepreneurs and connecting local opportunities with global capital. At the heart of this transformation is Warren Wheatley CA(SA), CFP®, whose investment, banking, and entrepreneurial experience has helped turn an unconventional vision into a listed financial services group with an increasingly global ambition.
For Warren, innovation is not simply a word; it is the philosophy behind building a financial future where capital is more accessible, businesses are empowered to grow, and Africa’s entrepreneurial potential can move from possibility to impact.
The Journey That Shaped the Leader Within
Warren Wheatley trained as a Chartered Accountant, completed his articles in 2001, and qualified as a Certified Financial Planner before spending eight years at Alexander Forbes, where he rose to Divisional Head of a consulting and actuarial business advising corporate clients with billions of rand under advisement. He then joined ABSA Capital and ABSA Wealth as an investment banker to ultra-high-net-worth families.
The Spark That Started It All
His entry was a natural progression through the financial services industry for which Warren was formally trained, from auditing through institutional consulting into investment banking and private equity.
The defining moment came while advising ultra-wealthy families. He saw a daily flow of extraordinary investment opportunities that ordinary people never get to see, and Warren developed a burning desire to change that. The conviction that a bank teller or call-centre agent should be able to own a stake in a game lodge or a credit fund for R100 became the founding thesis of Altvest, and ultimately of everything the company has built since.
In 2013, he took his first entrepreneurial leap with TSS Capital, and in 2015, Warren co-founded Lebashe Investment Group, serving as Chief Investment Officer and later as Chief Executive Officer as the company grew its asset base beyond R8.5 billion through landmark transactions with Capitec Bank, ArcelorMittal South Africa, EOH, and Arena Holdings.
In 2021, Warren founded Altvest Capital to democratise alternative investments for ordinary South Africans. In 2025, that business became Africa Bitcoin Corporation, the continent’s first listed Bitcoin treasury company, and today trades on the JSE Main Board, the Namibian Stock Exchange, the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, and the OTCQB in the United States, with admission to London’s Aquis Growth Market now underway. “I chose Innovation because every one of these chapters asked the same question: who gets access to capital, and can that be re-engineered? I have never accepted that the architecture of finance is fixed,” he shares.
The People Who Inspired the Journey
For Warren, the most defining influence on his life is his father, Gregory Wheatley. “He never had the chance to get an education himself, yet he was fanatical about making sure I got one. I still remember him arriving at parent and teacher meetings in dirty overalls, straight from a breakdown site, having downed tools to be there. I did not appreciate it at the time, but looking back, those moments were foundational to my work ethic. He taught me the meaning of hard work by living it in front of me every day,” he shares.
“Professionally, Danny Mackay, along with Tshepo Mahloele, gave me my first shot at entrepreneurship, trusting me with real responsibility and real capital before I had a track record to point to. And through it all, my wife Tatum and my children anchor me. Tatum is simultaneously my rock to stand on and my soft landing space when I need one. They give me the space to grow and remain my greatest motivators. My ethos comes directly from these people: work hard, back talent early, and hold the door open for the next person,” he adds.
Learning, Leading, and Scaling Success
Warren’s CA(SA) and CFP® training gave him technical rigour, along with the discipline to understand a balance sheet, a structure, and a risk before falling in love with an idea. The greater gift, though, was excellent mentors and former leaders at every stage, who taught him how institutions actually make decisions. Years spent as a fiduciary, including as Deputy Chairman of the Telkom Retirement Fund and Chairman of the Investment Committee of the Transnet Retirement Fund, two of Africa’s largest pension funds, taught him governance at scale. Scaling an enterprise means marrying entrepreneurial speed with institutional discipline, and Warren’s education and mentors gave him both vocabularies.
From Vision to Venture
Altvest Capital was founded in March 2021 with a simple vision: take private-market opportunities out of the boardroom and put them within reach of every South African. The company pioneered listed preference share classes, each ring-fenced against a single alternative asset such as a luxury safari lodge, a family restaurant group, or an SME credit fund, so retail investors could participate from as little as R100.
The company listed on the Cape Town Stock Exchange in 2022 and moved to the JSE in 2024. Then market reality sharpened the vision: the single greatest obstacle to African prosperity is the cost of capital. In February 2025, Altvest Capital became the first listed company in Africa to adopt Bitcoin as a treasury asset, and in September 2025, it rebranded as Africa Bitcoin Corporation, pairing a Bitcoin treasury with its SME credit platform. In May 2026, the company advanced to the JSE Main Board. The mission never changed; the technology for achieving it did.
Turning Challenges into Milestones
However, for Warren, building Altvest Capital came with the challenge of poverty, at least relative to his peers, both while growing up and again as a founder. Entrepreneurship itself is a formidable teacher. Warren and his team bootstrapped the business with founder capital while competing against incumbents with far deeper resources, and their disruptive posture initially earned scepticism from institutional players. They overcame these constraints by listing early, which forced transparency and accountability on them before anyone demanded it, rebuilding the board with respected independent voices, and embracing a fail-fast approach: testing ideas publicly, killing what did not work, and doubling down on what did. Public scrutiny that once felt like a burden became the credibility that unlocked institutional partnerships. Scarcity, properly harnessed, became their discipline.
What Sets the Enterprise Apart
The company leads the space because it approached the problem differently. It identified the cost of capital as the key obstacle to African enterprise and built every solution around dismantling it. Altvest Capital is Africa’s first listed Bitcoin treasury company and the world’s first Bitcoin-backed SME growth accelerator, a dual-engine model that pairs a hard-asset treasury with a proven private credit platform. Its Altvest Credit Opportunities Fund has deployed nearly R395 million across 44 SMEs in 21 industries, growing assets under management by 77.5% in FY2026 to R502 million, with a cumulative write-off rate below 0.1%, while lending at rates well below the 24% to 36% that SMEs are typically charged. Its preference-share structures let ordinary investors own these strategies through regulated exchanges. No peer combines all of that.
The Next Chapter of Innovation
Everything Altvest Capital is doing is transformative and a first in the industry. In August 2026, the company will commence trading on London’s Aquis Growth Market, its sixth market. Its board has approved a United States expansion built on a Delaware holding company with two operating subsidiaries: one replicating its SME lending model for underserved American businesses, the other conducting institutional Bitcoin treasury operations. The company is also concluding Bitcoin-backed lending facilities with leading global counterparties, using its treasury as collateral to unlock low-cost dollar funding for on-lending to African SMEs, which collapses the cost of capital across two continents. Each initiative compounds the same thesis: sound collateral in service of the real economy.
Innovation That Delivers Results
Innovation, for Altvest Capital, means refusing to accept structural problems that everyone else treats as permanent. The company operationalises it by giving every idea a fast, public test and measuring it against one question: does this lower the cost of capital or widen access to it? Two examples define the company.
First, its preference share technology changed the formation of capital for private credit. Each listed share class is ring-fenced against a single asset, so a retail investor’s R100 flows directly into SME loans, turning a stock exchange into a funding pipe for the real economy.
Second, its Bitcoin treasury: by holding the hardest collateral in the world, the company can borrow dollars at a fraction of African interest rates and lend onward to entrepreneurs who could never access those rates themselves.
Where Responsibility Meets Leadership
In terms of responsibilities and leadership, Warren’s style distils into three words: leading by doing. He remains the group’s chief capital allocator, responsible for strategy, treasury policy, major transactions and its relationships with regulators, exchanges and investors across six markets. But he has never asked anyone on his team to do something he would not do himself, whether that is underwriting risk personally, presenting to a sceptical room or working through the night on a listing. Beyond that, his core responsibility is people: recruiting exceptional talent, protecting a culture of candour and ensuring the next generation of leaders inside the group gets the same opportunities he was once given. Founders set culture by example or not at all.
Where Leadership Meets Distinction: Awards & Spotlight
The milestones are recorded in the company’s financial statements: five international listings in under five years, ACOF’s growth to R502 million in assets under management with a write-off rate below 0.1%, and a deliberate focus on women-owned businesses that earned Altvest the Environmental Finance ESG Investment Initiative of the Year (Africa) award in 2023, followed by recognition as Africa’s Most Innovative SME Growth Platform in 2026. Beyond the numbers, Warren’s motivation for expanding to the United States captures the insight that matters most: the financing gap that excludes African entrepreneurs also excludes millions of American small businesses, and a model forged in one of the world’s hardest markets can serve the world’s largest. Altvest did not come this far to stop at a border.
The Art of Leading Without Losing Yourself — The Habits Behind High Performance
Routine and near-regimental discipline. Warren’s days are structured with military precision: early mornings, physical training, deep-work blocks before the markets open and protected thinking time away from screens, because a leader’s most expensive mistakes are made when tired and reactive. But the discipline only works because of what waits at home. Tatum and their children are the reason the pressure never hollows him out. They anchor him; they give him room to grow, and time with them is not a break from the mission; it is the point of it. Whatever the markets do, Warren knows exactly where his feet land at the end of the day.
Envisioning the Future, Shaping the Present
“I imagine an entity executing its strategy across the world: treasury operations compounding Bitcoin per share from Johannesburg to New York, our credit platform funding SMEs on two continents, and listings spanning Africa, Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States, with the American expansion fully operational. My personal aspirations and the corporate vision are precisely aligned, because my ambition now is to execute on our impact initiative: proving that affordable capital, delivered at scale to overlooked entrepreneurs, is the most powerful development tool there is. I measure my own success in businesses funded, jobs created, and the write-off rate we protect while doing it,” assures Warren.
Navigating the Challenges of Modern Leadership
Indecisiveness. In Africa, the group’s structural challenges are real: scarce capital, regulatory drag and the emigration of skills. But the greater danger is leaders who study problems endlessly rather than act. Warren’s view is: fail fast. Make the decision, test it in the real world and let evidence, not committees, tell the group whether to persist or pivot. Speed of iteration is the only sustainable advantage an under-capitalised region has. Leaders must also confront the trust deficit: communities have been promised transformation for decades and seen too little of it, so credibility must now be earned through delivery rather than rhetoric. Every month spent deliberating is a month an entrepreneur somewhere else is executing.
Words for the Leaders of Tomorrow
“You surround yourself with different voices, people more talented than you, and encourage them to be vocal and to participate. The gravest risk to any leader is an echo chamber. I deliberately built a board and executive team of people who out-think me in their domains and feel safe telling me I am wrong, and every major breakthrough we have had began as a challenge to my own view. Legacy is not built by the smartest person in the room. It is built by the person humble enough to assemble that room and brave enough to listen to it,” Warren advises.
