Entrepreneur

Based: Cape Town

Xabiso Lombo  is the co-founder of Guardian Gabriel, a personal safety company whose primary offering is a panic button which allows the user to send an SMS with their exact location to friends and family in case of an emergency. Growing up in Queenstown in the Eastern Cape as the youngest of three sisters she would complete her schooling there before moving to Cape Town to study a degree in BCom Accounting at the University of Cape Town.

Xabiso had an entrepreneurial spirit from a young age even though she didn’t that it was called entrepreneurship at the time, she always had ideas to make money at school, such as selling nail polish remover to students at the beginning of the term or selling textbooks on behalf of other students and taking a commission. She got the idea for her project when there was an outbreak of missing persons during her second year of studies, as well as an increase in on-campus crime which made her afraid for her safety. Asking herself what she would in a dangerous situation and not having answers made her research for options, not finding viable ones and deciding that she had to develop something herself.