Natalie Cuthbert is CTO and Co-Founder of Stitch, a company with a mission to enable businesses in Africa to build and scale fintech-enabled products better and faster.
As an active member of the South African game development community, she helps organise the punk experimental games party, Super Friendship Arcade, and mines for emergent aesthetics as part of her technical art practise.
Natalie is a queer, trans woman, and as a leader in a fast growing startup, aims to build an inclusive, diverse workplace.
Stitch launched in February 2021 and has offices in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Lagos.
Stitch is an API fintech company that allows developers to build and scale financial products across Africa in a matter of days. This infrastructure-led approach supports a number of different use cases, including KYC & onboarding, personal & business finance, lending, insurance, wallet top-ups and more.
As head of the technology division, Natalie prioritises building a humanist engineering culture, one that emphasises security, user-privacy, and accessibility.
A software engineer herself, Natalie is involved in the open source community. Her open source work has appeared in the Pragmatic Programmer, a global best-selling programming book.
Prior to founding Stitch, Natalie was an early member of WhereIsMyTransport, primarily in the R&D division, a role in which she explored ways to facilitate access to public transport information systems for informal transport in emerging markets and to make mapping more sustainable.
She also was a software architect at Root, a digital insurance platform, where she designed many of their early core systems.
As part of a collective including Ben Rausch, and Robbie Fraser, amongst others, she helps curate the experimental punk video-game party, Super Friendship Arcade, which aims to foster inclusive creativity, play and expand the creative palette of video games amongst the public.
SFA has been extant since 2013 and was also a featured exhibit as part of Africa Games Week 2018 and 2019.
Natalie has been designing games since 2013. A particular focus of hers has been developing unique visual styles and aesthetics. This also encompasses animation styles and systems.
Most recently with her collaborators, and a line-up of music producers, Natalie helped developed the game Search Questival, which was nominated for the 2021 A MAZE Digital Moment Award. Search Questival aimed to capture the liminal feeling of the real life Search festival which was cancelled due to COVID-19. The game features a full line-up of original sets.
Currently Natalie is working on bringing motion capture into her workflow.