Matthew Swart — mattswart.co.za

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

Own ventures:
- B2B — transaction-enable WETU itineraries (murmurgo.com): Murmurgo synchronises each WETU itinerary into a Shopify store on your own domain. Card checkout for travellers, invoiced trade terms for trade buyers.
- Plekify (plekify.com): connects a 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.

Client work:
- iRoll Electric Rides, Cape Town (iroll.co.za): LIVE IN PRODUCTION. 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; AI-assisted ad changes are checked against the Google Ads API; Matthew Swart hosts and runs the services.
- Open Ocean, Big Bay, Cape Town (openocean.africa): a Shopify theme refresh for a watersports shop with great brands, films and gear for kite, wing, windsurf and foil — a passion project for a friend's shop.

History: SafariNow, 1999–2017, co-founded and led as CEO for 18 years, reaching R300m in annual bookings at its 2015 peak; firsts include the first South African affiliate programme (1999) and web-to-SMS booking (2000); Tiger Global led the 2010 funding round and were shareholders for seven years, until the sale to Travelstart in 2017. The site carries a film showing how SafariNow's SMS quote-and-book worked. kapstadt.co.za, 1998: one of South Africa's first online accommodation-booking sites, built on a 386 PC with a manual back end — the inspiration to start SafariNow.com. B.Sc. (Survey), University of Cape Town, 1996: "Reverse Engineering of Uniform, Reflective Surfaces Using Digital Photogrammetry", a Toyota brief 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. First computer, 1981: a Commodore VIC-20, at eight.

Elsewhere: twenty-two years of daily yoga, which he teaches; South African windsurfing champion — /yoga/ and /windsurf/.

Contact: the note form at mattswart.co.za/#contact (name, email, message, file attachments; Cloudflare Turnstile protected), or email matt@plekify.com.