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About · Est. 2021, Cape Town

Two founders.
One philosophy.
A trust operating system for 2,400+ distributed teams.

Naledi Mokwena and Tomás Eriksson started Ubuntual in 2021 to turn the Ubuntu saying — I am because we are — into rituals, benchmarks, and feedback loops that distributed companies can actually measure. Seven years, twenty-seven people, eleven countries later, the idea is the operating system, not a manifesto.

Book Your Ubuntu Diagnostic Read the origin story

For press inquiries: [email protected] · Investors: [email protected]

The founders

Meet Naledi & Tomás — two origin stories, one shared conviction.

One was a People Lead at a fully-remote company of 800. The other had spent a decade running engineering for a Nordic fintech that never met in person. Both arrived at the same conclusion: distributed work is a culture problem disguised as a tooling problem.

Portrait of Naledi Mokwena, co-founder of Ubuntual, photographed on a Cape Town rooftop.

Cape Town · Co-founder & CEO

Naledi Mokwena

Spent four years as People Lead at Doist, the fully-remote company behind Todoist, where she watched eight different distributed teams try — and mostly fail — to scale belonging across time zones. Before that she built onboarding programs at two Cape Town startups. She wrote the first draft of the Ubuntu Trust Framework on a flight back from the Remote Work Summit in 2019.

  • Previously People Lead, Doist
  • Background Industrial psychology, UCT
  • Writes on Onboarding, async rituals, the loneliness curve
[email protected] →
Portrait of Tomás Eriksson, co-founder of Ubuntual, photographed at his desk in Stockholm.

Stockholm · Co-founder & CTO

Tomás Eriksson

Was CTO of a fully-remote Nordic fintech that grew from nine to two hundred and sixty people without a single headquarters. He personally saw three engineering teams lose cohesion after a reorg and decided distributed teams deserved better infrastructure than ad-hoc Slack rituals. He brought the engineering rigor and the timezone math; Naledi brought the philosophy and the people science.

  • Previously CTO, fully-remote Nordic fintech
  • Background Distributed systems, KTH
  • Writes on Async engineering, trust metrics, data ethics
[email protected] →

On why we started Ubuntual

The most expensive thing in any distributed company isn't the payroll, the SaaS stack, or the timezone overlap. It is the slow, invisible collapse of trust between people who never share a room.

We built Ubuntual because we believe trust is an engineering problem — not a feeling you hope for — and because the Ubuntu philosophy has been running this experiment for a very long time, on a very large scale, without anyone shipping the software to match.

— Naledi & Tomás, founders, Cape Town & Stockholm

The company in five figures

The numbers we publish; the numbers we'd rather you audit.

Everything below is on the record as of Q2 2025 and verifiable through press, regulators, or the source we link to.

2021

Founded in Cape Town by Naledi Mokwena & Tomás Eriksson

$4.2M

Seed round led by Atlantica Ventures (2023), with Puzzle Ventures

27

Full-time staff across 11 countries on 5 continents

2,400+

Distributed teams in 64 countries trust Ubuntual daily

Where we are

Workshop17, Portswood Ridge, 1 Dock Road, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town, 8001, South Africa — and the kitchen tables of 26 colleagues from Lisbon to Lagos.

What we won't compromise

SOC 2 Type II certified, GDPR-compliant from day one. We were audited before we were profitable, and we'd do it again. The team-trust data we collect is anonymized at the source and never sold, ever — not even in aggregate to advertisers.

How to reach a human

[email protected]
+27 21 200 0148
Mon–Fri, 08:00–18:00 SAST — we answer in four languages and one Zulu greeting.

Trust, third-party verified

Featured, funded, and awarded.

We don't grade our own homework. The institutions below have graded it for us.

Press

Harvard Business Review

The Ubuntu Operating System for Remote Work — May 2024, long-read profile of our founding story and the Trust Framework.

Feature · May 2024

Press

The Economist

Featured in the 2024 special report on distributed organizations, alongside case studies from Buffer and GitLab.

Special report · 2024

Backed by

Atlantica Ventures & Puzzle Ventures

$4.2M seed (2023), led by Atlantica Ventures with Puzzle Ventures and 14 angels including the former chief of staff to the founder of a well-known open-source office-suite company.

Funding · Seed, 2023

Awards

'Culture Tool of the Year' & G2 Leader

Won the 2024 Remote Work Awards for Culture Tool of the Year; ranked #1 in G2's Employee Engagement category, Spring 2025 (4.8/5 across 1,180 reviews).

Awards · 2024 – 2025

Other places we've shown up: the African Leadership University case library · Buffer alumni company Mux · the fully-remote design studio Wild Frontiers · MIT Sloan Management Review, Fast Company, and the 2025 Remote Work Awards shortlist.

Once a year, in one city

The Ubuntu Summit, every February in Cape Town.

The Ubuntu Summit is our flagship — a 600-attendee, three-day gathering of distributed-team leaders held each February at the V&A Waterfront. No vendor booths, no sponsored sessions; just working sessions, hallway conversations, and the kind of trust-building that asynchronous tools never quite manage to replace. The third edition runs 18–20 February 2026; the first two sold out at 480 and 540 attendees respectively.

When
Wednesday – Friday, 18–20 February 2026
Where
Workshop17, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town
Who
600 Heads of People, Chiefs of Staff, and remote-first founders
Cost
Complimentary for Ubuntual customers · tiered for the rest
Reserve a Summit seat Read the 2025 recap