MATTHEW SWART

2026

SERVICES

Matthew Swart has worked in digital commerce since 1998, his current focus is using AI to build travel solutions in Shopify.

Abstract ink-on-paper artwork in which scattered dots gather into contour lines and settle into a calm, level plane.

OWN VENTURE

B2B - Transaction-enable WETU itineraries

Murmurgo synchronises each WETU itinerary into a Shopify store on your own domain. Card checkout for travellers, invoiced trade terms for trade buyers.

murmurgo.com (opens in a new tab)

Murmurgo's WETU card: a “wetu itinerary” sheet linking by a carmine line into a browser at yourdomain.com, showing a rising chart, $4,200 and a book button.

OWN VENTURE

B2B - Sell your rooms on Shopify

Plekify connects your Property Management system to a Shopify store on your own domain. Guests book and pay through Shopify's checkout, and the money settles to your own account. B2B Trade partners checkout on invoice.

plekify.com (opens in a new tab)

Plekify's social card: the Plekify lockup on cream paper above the line “Sell your rooms on your own Shopify.”

1999–2017

SAFARINOW

SafariNow was a South African accommodation-booking marketplace that Matthew Swart co-founded and led as CEO for 18 years, reaching R300m in annual bookings at its 2015 peak. Among its firsts were the first South African affiliate programme (1999) and web-to-SMS booking (2000). Tiger Global (opens in a new tab) led the 2010 funding round and were shareholders for seven years, until the sale to Travelstart in 2017.

The SafariNow logo: the word SafariNow in heavy black lettering with a fine white inline.

2000

SAFARINOW TEAM, KOMMETJIE, 2000
Four surfers in wetsuits standing in the sea off Kommetjie, a lighthouse on the horizon, 2000.
How SafariNow's SMS booking worked

CLIENT

OPEN OCEAN, BIG BAY

Open Ocean is a watersports shop at Big Bay, Cape Town, with great brands, films and gear for kite, wing, windsurf and foil. The project is a theme refresh on Shopify, a passion project for a friend's shop by someone who loves the water too.

openocean.africa (opens in a new tab)

OPEN OCEAN, BIG BAY
(opens in a new tab)

CLIENT

IROLL ELECTRIC RIDES, CAPE TOWN — LIVE IN PRODUCTION

iRoll is a Cape Town shop for electric scooters and unicycles, sold mostly over WhatsApp. Its commerce runs from the invoice: a Shopify draft order and the accounting invoice are created together, and payment is spotted without a gateway. Paid orders feed Google Ads, the AI-assisted ad changes are checked against the Google Ads API, and Matthew Swart hosts and runs the services.

iroll.co.za (opens in a new tab)

IROLL — MOVE WITH THE CURRENT

1998

KAPSTADT.CO.ZA

One of South Africa's first online accommodation-booking sites, built on a 386 PC with a manual back end. Lots of traffic from HotBot and AltaVista! The inspiration to start SafariNow.com

1996

B.SC. (SURVEY), REVERSE ENGINEERING BY CAMERA

University of Cape Town, and Matthew Swart's first deep immersion in digital technology. A Toyota brief asked how to measure a car door without touching it. Shiny, featureless surfaces defeat cameras, so he projected patterns of light onto the surface, using pixel-matching photogrammetry to reverse-engineer a 3D surface model to an accuracy of 0.14 mm; random patterns beat repetitive ones, signal over noise.

THE METHOD: PROJECTOR, TARGET FRAME, FOUR CAMERAS
Ink illustration of the method: a projector, a car door in a target frame, four cameras around it, and the measured surface.
FIVE PROJECTED PATTERNS, BEST TO WORST
  1. DENSE RANDOM
    0.140 MM
  2. REGULAR DOTS
    0.163 MM
  3. COARSE RANDOM
    0.283 MM
  4. GRID
    0.307 MM
  5. HONEYCOMB
    0.527 MM

1981

FIRST COMPUTER

A Commodore VIC-20, at eight.

A Commodore VIC-20
A Commodore VIC-20 home computer connected to its monitor.

ELSEWHERE

YOGA AND WINDSURFING

Twenty-two years of daily yoga, which he teaches. South African windsurfing champion.

/yoga/ · /windsurf/

YOGA AND WINDSURFING
Matthew Swart windsurfing on a large green breaking wave, spray flying, open sea behind.

NOW

CONTACT

Matt consults and builds commercial digital projects which require innovation, creativity, discernment and execution, to move your business from where you are, to where you want to be.

A small square portrait photo of Matthew Swart.