Every economy in human history has run on the same equation.
When Adam Smith published his famous work, The Wealth of Nations, in 1776, he was documenting what would become the formula for the next quarter-millennium: combine land, labour, and capital, multiply by productivity, and you get output. This means wealth, GDP, everything.
For 250 years, every major technology – steam engines, electricity, telecommunications, the internet – has improved only one variable in that equation: productivity. Economists call it Total Factor Productivity, the ‘A’ multiplier.
No matter how groundbreaking any single technological revolution may seem, over the long run of 250 years, it has grown at a rate of 1-2% per year, compounding slowly and predictably
Technology has made us more efficient, but it never removed the binding constraint: you always needed more people or more capital to produce more.
AI is fundamentally different – it doesn’t improve our efficiency, it removed constraints on labour.
Labour without limits
Every major technology since the steam engine has followed an S-curve: explosive growth, then plateau. Railways, electrification, the internet – all the same shape. The reason can be easily explained by the equation itself.
These technologies improved the productivity multiplier – but they never touched the constraints underneath. You still needed more workers to run more machines, more capital to build more factories, more land to house more infrastructure.
Productivity gains compounded for a while, but eventually the scarce inputs reasserted themselves – diminishing returns set in, and the curve flattened.
By unlocking labour, AI eliminates a key constraint that caused every previous curve to flatten.
A software engineer trains an AI to write code. That AI does the work of 10 engineers. Then a hundred. Then a thousand. The binding input isn’t human hours anymore – its compute power.
Compute power, unlike labour, has been growing exponentially for the last 60 years. Since 1965, transistor counts and compute power have doubled roughly every two years – a phenomenon known as Moore’s law. Despite many naysayers, this trend has shown no signs of slowing down.
This is why the growth rates look like nothing before.
OpenAI went from zero to a $300 billion valuation faster than Facebook reached $50 billion. Anthropic hit $60 billion in under three years. This is what happens when a company’s output is no longer constrained by how many people it can hire.
We’re in a phase transition – one that is going to be more dramatic than when the factories of Manchester changed the course of human destiny all those years ago.
The new value landscape
The companies at the centre of this transformation aren’t public. And they map directly onto the layers of the new equation.
At the intelligence layer – where compute becomes cognitive labour – OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI are building the foundation models that replace human hours with model hours. Every improvement in these models multiplies the amount of work that can be performed without hiring a single person.
At the hardware layer, the specialised silicon is being built that makes running the foundation models possible and profitable. The industry focused on graphics processing units (GPUs) initially – as seen in Nvidia’s meteoric rise from a gaming hardware company – but that was just the beginning of the optimisation journey.
AI’s exponential scaling demands purpose-built chips: Tenstorrent is designing processors from the ground up for AI workloads on open-source RISC-V architecture (pronounced ‘risk-five’; reduced instruction set computing, fifth design) – and Groq is engineering specialised language processing units for the fastest inference in the industry.
The companies that control the compute substrate sit beneath everything else in the stack.
At the application layer Databricks is revolutionising enterprise data infrastructure, Revolut is reinventing global banking, and Anduril is applying AI to defence and national security.
Each of these companies is replacing human-hours with model-hours across entirely different domains – proof that the new value equation is not confined to one industry.
None of them trade on any exchange. And most of the market is still pricing them using the old equation – modelling S-curves where there are none; projecting plateaus that aren’t coming.
South Africans have seen what happens when one investor prices in a structural shift before consensus catches up. In 2001, Naspers deployed $34 million into Tencent. One private-market cheque, before the rest of the world understood what was happening. It became the most valuable asset on the JSE. That was one company, in one technology wave.
The AI revolution is producing a dozen simultaneously, and the gap between structural reality and market consensus is wider than it has been before.
The returns don’t accrue to investors who wait for this to become obvious – they accrue to investors who act.
The problem for South African investors has never been conviction or vision, it’s been infrastructure.
Deal access requires institutional relationships. ZAR-to-USD conversion at competitive rates requires banking partnerships that don’t exist for individuals.
Legal structuring, South African Reserve Bank compliance and special-purpose vehicle (SPV) formation are each an expensive multi-month project. By the time you’ve navigated it, the round is closed.
OVEX Private Placements
OVEX has built the infrastructure layer that was missing.
OVEX Private Placements is a fully managed offshore private equity service for serious South African investors.
It collapses months of complexity into three simple steps:
- Allocate: Browse curated late-stage private equity rounds in global AI and fintech companies. Select your investment. Sign your digital commitment.
- Deploy: Fund in ZAR. OVEX converts at institutional foreign exchange (FX) rates and deploys directly into the investment vehicle. No offshore bank account required.
- Own: Receive your digital shareholding certificate with legally documented beneficial ownership.
SPV structuring, dual-jurisdiction legal compliance, FX execution, exit coordination – all handled.
The only step that stays with you is the Sars approval of international transfer (AIT) requirement for investments above the single discretionary allowance.
The window is finite
The best AI rounds are oversubscribed 10-20x. Stripe’s last round saw $30 billion in demand for $600 million of allocation.
Private equity rounds have hard caps. When they fill, they close. No exceptions.
For 250 years, wealth creation followed a predictable equation. That equation just changed. The investors who act on this new reality, before it becomes consensus, will define and capture the next era of returns.
OVEX Private Placements is how serious South African investors can access the biggest structural shift in economics since the Industrial Revolution.
Minimum investment: R1 000 000. Allocations are limited. First come, first served.
Join the waitlist here.
OVEX (Pty) Ltd is an authorised Financial Services Provider. This is not financial advice. Investment in private equity carries significant risk, including the potential for a total loss of capital. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. For investments above the Single Discretionary Allowance, SARS AIT approval is required.
OVEX Private Placements are facilitated via special purpose vehicle (SPV) structures on the secondary market. Tenstorrent is not a party to, and has not sponsored or endorsed, any OVEX investment product. These offerings are strictly available to Qualified Investors who are high-net-worth individuals or entities capable of a minimum investment of R1,000,000 and who understand, and are able to bear, the economic risk of a complete loss of their investment.
These offerings involve unlisted, illiquid assets with no regulated secondary market and no guarantee of exit within any particular timeframe or at any particular valuation. Investors should assume that investments may be held for an extended period, may be difficult or impossible to sell, and that a total loss of capital is possible.
Private placements of this nature are speculative and carry a high degree of risk, including but not limited to market risk, concentration risk, counterparty risk, regulatory and tax risk, foreign exchange risk (where applicable), and operational risks associated with underlying projects and SPV structures. Returns, if any, may be highly variable and are not guaranteed.
Nothing in the OVEX Private Placements materials constitutes financial, investment, tax, legal or other professional advice, nor an offer or solicitation to the public. Any participation is subject to, and may only be made on the basis of, the final binding transaction documents for the relevant SPV or investment vehicle, which set out the full terms, conditions, fees and risk factors.
Eligibility for participation may be subject to local laws and regulations in your jurisdiction, and access to OVEX Private Placements is restricted where such access would be unlawful. It is your responsibility to ensure that you comply with all applicable legal and regulatory requirements in your jurisdiction and that you do not rely solely on OVEX materials when making an investment decision.
Prospective investors should obtain independent legal, tax, regulatory and financial advice before committing capital and should carefully consider whether such high-risk, illiquid investments are appropriate in light of their investment objectives, experience, financial situation and risk tolerance. OVEX gives no assurance as to performance, liquidity, or capital protection and accepts no responsibility for any loss arising from reliance on the information provided or participation in any OVEX Private Placement.
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