Local entrepreneur, Joe Botha’s TrustFabric has received an investment from World of Avatar. WOA recently made headlines with their acquisition of MXit, and this seems to be one of their last investments for a while.

TrustFabric, which was founded in 2010, will integrate closely with WOA companies, including MXit to provide anti spam measures and child protection services. The child protection service, which is a new addition to TrustFabric, lets parents associate a date of birth with the mobile phone number and email address of their child. This helps protect children from inappropriate content such as adult SMS services, alcohol marketing, tobacco, gambling etc. brands and with MXit in mind, it can prevent adults interacting with minors for the wrong reasons.

MXit’s active South African user base enables TrustFarbic to profile a big portion of internet users in South Africa and then eventually provide that data to third parties via an API. These third parties can then check if they are allowed to send marketing content to specific numbers.

We reached out to Joe Botha for comment and he had the following to say:

TrustFabric is based in Stellenbosch from today. We’re happy to be a part of
the World of Avatar group and it made sense to be close to all the
action in the next few months.

We’re going to be integrating our TrustFabric Connect service and Child
Protect service with MXit, and we have a nice roadmap of related services.

The deal made a lot of sense for us: big user numbers in MXit, solid people
to work with and for me personally – an opportunity to move back to
Stellenbosch and get on a mountain bike more often.

TrustFabric is Joe’s 8th startup. He’s been a co-founder of Frogfoot Networks, Amobia Communications and South Africa’s first vendor neutral data centre provider: Teraco Data Environments.

With MXit’s past with inapproriate content being sent to underage individuals, TrustFabric is a great idea to prevent this in future. Another smart move by World of Avatar and Alan Knott Craig – look out for our video interview with Alan later in the week.