From university dropout to South African billionaire

Isaias (Zak) Jose Calisto, the founder and CEO of South Africa’s biggest fleet management and telematics company Karooooo, is close to becoming the country’s newest dollar billionaire.
Calisto holds 65% of the Karooooo group’s shares, with another 10% shareholding through a standing agreement with the company.
Karooooo’s share price has skyrocketed over 100% in the past year, boosting Calisto’s fortune.
As of Monday, 20 January 2025, the company’s market value was R27.96 billion.
Calisto’s stake in the company has surged to around R18 billion — close to $1 billion at current exchange rates.
His wealth is five times greater than six years ago, when Karooooo was still operating under the name of its core business — Cartrack.
Calisto was born in Portugal but his family moved to Mozambique when he was two years old, before ending up in South Africa.
He studied actuarial science at the University of the Witwatersrand but dropped out because he found the subject matter “quite boring.”
In an interview with BizNews, he explained he felt out of place among his fellow students and professors. After leaving university, he did his compulsory military service.
Thereafter, Calisto got a taste of the corporate world while participating in an accelerated training programme with Standard Bank from 1986 to 1991.
He started his own business with about R100 in 1994, working as a distributor of telematics devices.
Among his initial customers was Netstar, who would later become the biggest rival to his own business.
Launched in 2001, Cartrack was initially a joint venture with Netstar. The arrangement did not work out, in part due to different views on international expansions.
In 2004, Cartrack was spun off into a standalone firm.
Calisto said it was very difficult to break into the market in the early years.
To sell their technology, vehicle tracking companies had to be accredited by the Motor Vehicle Security Association of South Africa (VESA).
Membership required 3,000 subscribers and 100 recoveries, something an upstart could not offer.
Cartrack and VESA came to a compromise. Cartrack gave a financial guarantee that it would meet those thresholds within a certain time or refund customers.
Cartrack saw substantial subscriber and revenue growth and expanded into various countries in the years that followed.
In 2014, its venture into the Asian market made the company realise it would need to list to show foreign authorities it was a credible business. Cartrack listed on the JSE in 2014.
However, a move in headquarters to Singapore and increased focus on markets outside South Africa saw Cartrack delisting from the burse in 2021.
He relisted on the Nasdaq under a new holding company Karooooo.
Two decades after leaving the Netstar nest, Karoooo had amassed nearly 2.2 million subscribers in 24 countries and was employing over 2,500 staff.
Its customer count was also greater than Altron Netstar’s 1.9 million subscribers in 2024.
In addition, Karooooo generated around R3.84 billion in revenue — 50% more than Netstar — in its last financial year.

Calisto believes that continuous innovation and improvements in Cartrack’s technology were key to its explosive growth.
“Technology is like a garden — you never stop working on it,” he said.
“We’ve evolved a lot since 2004. What we’re doing today with our technology has nothing to do with what we initially started out with.”
“Our technology is not only about recovering a vehicle or performing analytics on the vehicle’s data, but it’s also become about analytics on the driver and helping businesses deliver good services to their customers.”
Karooooo’s unusual name has an interesting background. It was born out of Calisto’s deep love for the Karoo region in South Africa.
The extra o’s were necessary because the company wanted to have a domain that matched its name and the US owner of karoo.com would only sell the domain for a few million dollars.
The company figured that the additional o’s would not affect pronunciation and bought the domains for “Karoo” with three to ten o’s.
That way, customers unsure about the number of o’s could mistype and still end up on the correct website.
At the time of publication, typing in four, six, or seven o’s redirected to the company’s actual website.