Pinagare Mogodi | Founder & Group CEO of MAB Group

Pinagare Mogodi (born 11 November 1989) is a South African entrepreneur and business executive, and the founder and Group Chief Executive Officer of MAB Group (Matsapa-A-Botshelo), a diversified industrial company headquartered near Johannesburg with operations in mining, construction, logistics, energy, exports, and telecommunications. He founded the company in 2010 and built it into a multi-sector operator known for coal and chrome production, growing the business without traditional bank funding.

Born in Itsoseng in South Africa's North West province and raised in Rustenburg by a single mother, Mogodi has credited his uncle, Ignatius Oupa Mphomane, as an early mentor in business. He studied at Midrand Graduate Institute in Midrand, with coursework in financial management, business management, and public relations, and holds additional qualifications in project management, Pastel accounting, and strategic planning.

Mogodi founded MAB Group during his university years. It began as a construction firm and added mining and trucking divisions in 2016. The early years were marked by financial difficulty, with debts that by several accounts exceeded R50 million during the COVID-19 pandemic. He restructured the company and secured coal export contracts that became its primary source of cash flow, before expanding into chrome production drawn from the Bushveld Igneous Complex, with exports routed primarily through Richards Bay.

The company later diversified through MAB Energy, a fuel supply arm, and MAB Connect, a connectivity division providing affordable internet to underserved provinces. Mogodi has emphasized a vertically integrated model and the practice of running coal and chrome as parallel commodity engines that offset each other through market cycles. In 2026, when disruption to global shipping insurance froze South African coal exports, he raised capital for chrome to maintain revenue, an approach widely cited in coverage of the company.

Mogodi and MAB Group have been profiled in publications including Forbes Africa, CNBC Africa, USA Today, GQ South Africa, Business Insider Africa, and Leadership magazine. He was noted among a generation of African business leaders around the November 2025 G20 Summit in Johannesburg. He has framed job creation in the communities where the company operates as a central measure of its success.