---
title: Nico van Zyl — Career and client timeline
canonical: https://nicovanzyl.com/career.md
last_updated: 2026-08-11
---

# Nico van Zyl — Career and client timeline

Nico van Zyl is a Johannesburg-based design engineer with more than 15 years of experience and work spanning 50+ projects. The dates below reproduce the portfolio’s recorded career and engagement windows. An entry identifies work associated with that organization or product; it does not necessarily imply full-time employment.

## Current ventures

- **2025–present — Altostrat:** Head of Product Design for a network operations workspace for engineers, teams, and agents.
- **2025–present — Owners Circle:** Co-founded, designed and built a platform for enthusiasts to manage and enjoy their cars.

## Career and selected product work

- **2022–2025 — Simvida:** Led design and development for a fintech platform focused on accessible financial services and wealth building.
- **2024 — Harbour Wealth**
- **2023–2024 — MikroCloud**
- **2023 — Bear Blog**
- **2021–2023 — Luminary:** Created a shared design language that helped multiple product teams ship as one.
- **2022 — Potential Bets**
- **2021–2022 — Razor**
- **2021–2022 — Neudoerfler**
- **2021–2022 — woom:** Built design-system and shopping-experience work for the award-winning bicycle company.
- **2019–2021 — Shopstar**
- **2021 — Stream:** Redesigned interfaces through a design system for the logistics platform used across the VAT IT group.
- **2021 — Connect**
- **2021 — Castle One**
- **2021 — Bixbio**
- **2021 — The Media**
- **2020–2021 — National Arts Festival**
- **2021 — About Betting**
- **2021 — Juice Revolution**
- **2021 — ASSITEJ**
- **2019–2021 — Microbiome**
- **2020–2021 — BiomatrixWeb**
- **2020 — PowerCloud**
- **2020 — Szemere / Semeris**
- **2020 — SAFFAS**
- **2020 — WhatsApp**
- **2020 — Timed**
- **2020 — Evented**
- **2019–2020 — Imagemakers**
- **2020 — PlayerWanted**
- **2020 — Indiemaker**
- **2019 — PHP Conference**
- **2019 — UK Power Networks**
- **2019 — Zip**
- **2019 — Myperks**
- **2019 — Valufin**
- **2019 — 1KProjects**
- **2019 — Saftrade**
- **2014–2019 — Wixel**
- **2013 — Foxhat**

## Selected portfolio links

- [Altostrat](https://altostrat.io/)
- [Owners Circle](https://ownerscircle.world/)
- [Simvida](https://simvida.com/)
- [Stream](https://www.vatitstream.com/)
- [woom](https://woom.com/)
- [Luminary](https://luminaryy.netlify.app/)
- [Airpool](https://airpool.co.za/)

## Capabilities demonstrated across the timeline

- Product and interface design
- Production frontend development
- Design systems and reusable interface architecture
- User experience and product refinement
- Modernization of legacy products
- Collaboration with founders, designers, engineers, and product teams
- Work across startup, scale-up, and enterprise contexts

For the concise profile, see [about.md](https://nicovanzyl.com/about.md). For machine-readable identity data, see [profile.json](https://nicovanzyl.com/profile.json).