01
Why we exist
About us.
There is a particular kind of person in this industry who is brilliant at the demo and useless at the decade that follows it. They make something look impressive to somebody who cannot tell the difference, and attach a large price tag. The industry is full of them.
That is why Claer & Volker exists. We started in 2020, in the gap those people leave behind: ordinary businesses that need real software help and have no way of telling the genuine article from the performance. We are the firm for the businesses that have been burnt by the dazzle-and-bill crowd, or are about to be and do not know it yet, and we are built for the actual context of the South African market.
Almost everything else about how we work comes down from that. Judgement ahead of output, clarity ahead of motion, and a permanent suspicion of anything that is impressive from the front and a mess at the back.
02
What we sell
What we sell.
We take a client from an unclear problem to a working system without lying to them on the way.
People come to us because something is not where it needs to be. An idea with no technical path. A process living inside five people’s heads. An old platform nobody fully understands. A previous provider who disappointed them. A weak software company hears the request and starts building. A good one asks questions first.
Code is not rare any more. Anyone can produce it, and increasingly so can a laptop. What is rare is knowing what should be built, why, what it will cost, what it will break, and whether it will still make sense in two years. When you ask us for a feature we will hear the feature, and we will also listen for the pain behind it, because the request is usually a symptom and the real work is the condition underneath.
03
The team
The team.
We are eight people in one office in Pretoria, our only one, with no departments to hide in. The titles describe responsibility rather than rank, and on an engagement of any size you will work directly with several of us.
Leadership
CE van der Dussen
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Runs the business and holds the client relationships. Spends most of his time on the commercial side of engagements and on choosing C&V’s work, which is now as much about turning things down as taking them on.
Ruben Coetzee
Chief Technology Officer
Owns technical direction. He decides how a system is shaped before it is built, and he is the one who inherits somebody else’s codebase and works out what is actually wrong with it. On most engagements you will deal with him directly.
Andrea Dugmore
Chief Operating Officer
Owns operations. Most of the standards this site describes, from how we communicate to how work moves through delivery, are written down because Andrea wrote them down.
Engineering
Wihann Engelbrecht
Team Lead
Closest to the day-to-day flow of engineering work, and usually the person who knows where every piece of work currently stands. First stop for unblocking something and for deciding what comes first.
Jonathan Faurie
Software Engineer
Works across delivery, from new build through to the maintenance that keeps a system running after launch.
Pieter Viljoen
Software Developer
Works on client systems day to day, both the software we build from scratch and the software we take over.
Marketing and design
An internal function. We do not sell marketing or design services.
Delné Grobler
Marketing Lead
Runs the content and case study side of things.
Lesedi Sedibelwana
Graphic Designer
Handles the visual side of the work, from client-facing material to the way the things we build are presented.
Our clients are not all in Pretoria and our systems are not all hosted here. We work with people we have never been in a room with, and we go to a site when being on the site is the only way to understand the problem.
04
Our size
Deliberately small.
We are deliberately small, and we intend to stay small enough that everybody knows what everybody else is building. That has consequences we accept: we turn work down, and we will tell you when something is beyond our current capacity rather than taking it and finding out together.
The standards we hold ourselves to get applied to our own products before we apply them to anybody’s system. Decisions recorded rather than remembered. Architecture enforced at build time rather than in review. Backups restored rather than merely configured. A document for every system that lets somebody else pick it up.
Claer & Volker
453 Winifred Yell St, Garsfontein
Pretoria, South Africa
info@claervolker.com
© 2026 Claer & Volker
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