Easy to grasp? Apple has announced plans to include an AirPods feature that will live-translate other languages in real-time. It could be ready as early as the next update later this year — no word, though, on how good it’ll be with notoriously difficult languages like Afrikaans, but let’s see.

In this Open Letter:

• Big clearance: The SA startup tackling R2.5 trillion in fast-fashion waste.
• Google Gemini’s Getty, local learning landings & Solly saving Starlink?
• Head in the game: Where to catch the latest big trends in SA software.
• Who recognised this SA delivery marketplace? The results are in.
• Lonely building your startup? Join The Open Collab and get support.

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WE ARE COMING TO GAUTENG!

Gauteng, are you ready for the first ever in-person The Open Letter event?

We are coming to town on the 27th of March (that’s next week!), and we will be hosting an event filled with great conversations, networking and a whole lot of fun.

With special guests, Priaash Ramadeen, co-founder of The Awareness Company and Merelda Wu, co-founder of Melio AI, we are going to discuss how AI is enabling the creation of entirely new businesses, what it takes to build an AI company in Africa and how South African founders can stand to benefit from the AI revolution!

Get your tickets now! And hurry up; tickets are limited!

Buy Tickets

TRENDING NOW

Solving Earth’s R2.5 Trillion Fashion Headache

In today’s Tuesday Deep Dive, we examine the environmental and business costs of fast fashion, showcasing a local startup solving for a better way to provide premium clothing experiences to all of SA…

The fast-fashion industry churns out between 80 billion and 150 billion jackets, shoes, dresses, T-shirts and more every year… with as much as 10–40% going unsold.

Eek, that’s 8–60 billion excess items of fashion, an overstock worth some $140 billion in unmet sales (R2.5 trillion)… 

Why is this happening?

• Manufacturers enforce minimum order levels – just 100 T-shirts? No way.
• On the flip side: Retailers leverage economies of scale – bigger orders, lower cost per item, higher margins.
• Rapidly changing retail and fashion trend cycles.
• Retailers hate nothing more than missing out on a sale – so they’d rather order more stock than run out of something popular.

Return to seller…

That’s not even scratching the surface, though: Another big contributor to waste is returned items, with an alarming new trend rising on social media…

Influencers buy a “haul” of clothing items online, and then use their homes as fitting rooms, parading outfits to their followers on TikTok – asking if they should “keep or return” the items… (Could’ve gone our whole lives not knowing this is a thing, but there you have it.)

Clothing returns vary by type and where it was bought: In-store purchase returns are 10%, while online clothing purchases are double that at 26%.

Bad for business, bad for the planet

Ok, so where do all these overstocked leftovers and returns end up?

Most never go back on sale, and as much as 50% end up in landfills, 25% being incinerated, and 25% recycled.

But in reality, tons of this stuff ends up in places like Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, South Africa, and Uganda under the guise of charitable donations. Problem is 20–50% of the bales of clothing cannot be used and end up in our landfills.

The local heroes finding clothing a new home

Local tech-enabled clothing retailer FARO, is tackling the problem of fashion overstocking and returns with their innovative approach: Placing high-end stores in non-core, emerging markets, where fashion brands can sell their unsold inventory for as much as 60% off. 

A solid idea since South Africans want great fashion, but at a good price. And we like that they’re making it a premium shopping experience, too.

And while FARO does not have an e-commerce presence (a smart intentional play so they’re not competing with the actual brands), they currently have 4 stores (with 12+ coming this year alone), and over 3’000 brands in-store, offering their shoppers the same premium experience as if they were shopping at these fancy stores themselves.

FARO stocks:

• Last season’s overstocked items
• Open or damaged packaging (yet nothing wrong with the item itself)
• Wrong colours or odd sizes (common in about 10% of stock).

But it retains an element of lucky play: FARO doesn't stock a concentration of specific brands, so the items you do find might be pretty scarce. 

The secret sauce of FARO IQ

FARO needs to process an enormous volume of fashion merchandise – perhaps a bit too much for humans, which is why they employ an AI platform called FARO IQ.

It automates buying, merchandise planning, and pricing. It’ll even analyse a brand’s stock list and score it based on how well similar items have performed at FARO’s various outlets. This helps FARO make the right buying decisions while helping the warehouse team process and price everything.

Is this the secret sauce to help FARO scale? Time will tell.

They recently raised $6 million, and have a bold vision of 1’000 stores across the African continent. 

It truly is global fashion at Mzansi prices. We’re watching this space…

CHECK THIS OUT

The Next Big Trends in Software?

DevConf 2025 is fast approaching and our friends at Lula are hosting the official cocktail event in both Johannesburg & Cape Town...

We caught up with John Dalton, Lula’s Head of Engineering, to hear what he’s most excited about for DevConf this year and what they’ve been up to.

Be in the know, you know…

John says that conferences are great places to challenge your assumptions and get some external validation of what you’re thinking about building, because…

1. Some of these technical aspects are covered in talks
2. There’s tons of industry expertise in the room, you simply strike up a convo, and ask your question…

The big culture shift at conference talks

John’s seen a big shift towards culturally focused talks. While technical talks are always great, talks that focus on culture, especially psychological safety at work, are also applicable to engineers.

In the past year since John joined Lula, they’ve done a lot to mature their software delivery, refine their agile practices, and bring predictability and trust to Lula’s software delivery capabilities. 

Lula’s list of next big things…

The team at Lula have also been cooking up some exciting stuff recently:

1. Releasing the Lula mobile App (currently released to “friends and family”). 
2. Building an engineering culture by getting the right kind of competencies into the business, enabling the team to be autonomous and deliver well.
3. Lula’s data strategy involving Snowflake, and how it’s going to change the way they see data in the business.

Get your most pressing engineering Qs answered at…

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IN SHORT

Something worth repeating at the water cooler…

💊 Screening on steroids. Local PropTech startup Preferental is taking the pain out of tenant screening with an app that automates and accelerates the process, using AI to provide real-time, accurate tenant evaluations in mere seconds. Can’t wait for the app to screen out weirdo landlords…

🤖 Gemini photoshop. Well, well, well. Looks like some clever peeps have figured out how to use Google’s Gemini AI: Gemini Flash 2.0 to remove watermarks from images from stock image sites like Getty. In fact, it doesn't just remove the watermark, it fills in the blanks too. Where was this tech during the days of Thunda.com?

💼 SME learning. Grindstone managing partner Catherine Young’s Thinkroom Consulting has launched a new online learning solution for SMEs with self-paced learning videos, business templates and self-assessments on entrepreneurship, strategy, finance, legal, using AI for brand, GTM and sales enablement. Very nice.

🛰️ Starlink breakthrough? SA’s Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies Solly Malatsi has a plan that could see multinational firms (like Starkink) sidestep the BEE requirements by investing directly into initiatives that empower previously disadvantaged people and businesses instead. Hmmmm. Interesting…

😎 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with all your VC and startup legal sorted by Dommisse Attorneys, your own CFO for a fraction of the cost with OCFO and 12 more vital startup tools & services.

BUILDING TOGETHER

Happening over at The Open Collab

In the last few days alone, in our online network, we…

• Got to know everyone and forged bonds at the Chat Roulette 💬.
• Had a phenomenal session getting first-hand insights on offshoring your company from SA.
• Got our invites for tonight’s Cape Town rooftop founder’s social 🥂.
• Helped Nita with some awesome options for Afrikaans transcriptions.
• Got Elijah and Danei their first couple of newsletter subs.
• Discussed optimal landline calling app options for HubSpot.
• Booked our spots for our first-ever JHB in-person event.
• Welcomed so many new members, our heads are spinning in a good way 💃🏻🕺🏽.

Thinking about joining The Open Collab?

• Supercharge your network in the SA startup landscape — get that introduction, get that customer, or meet that partner.
• Get feedback on your products, services and/or offers from others who have built and are building their own products right now.
• Join all our online and in-person events for free!
• Exclusive 1-on-1 sessions with startup consultants.

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WHAT YOU SAID

Drop it like it’s hot…

Last Fast-Five Friday, we gave you 3 startup lies and 1 truth, and not that many knew of Droppa…

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ 🛰️ Orbi-Trac: A satellite logistics startup that tracks cargo shipments from space. (35%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨 🚜 SoilSynth: A BioTech using AI-driven soil analysis to increase crop yields sustainably. (41%)

🟩🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🚚 Droppa: A platform that connects users with on-demand delivery and moving services. (18%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🏦 VaultEase: A SecureTech that locks away your valuables in 24/7 on-the-move unmarked vehicles for maximum security. (6%)

Your 2 cents…

So there you have it, Benjamin, SoilSynth doesn’t exist yet, but a cool idea? ⚗️

Now it’s just the race to get it copyrighted, William. 🚀

And now you know where to find them, Pam! 🚚

BEFORE YOU GO

Here are 3 Ways We Can Help You

Advertise or Partners — Engage 21 000 South African professionals that read The Open Letter - partner with us or run an ad campaign.

Build A Newsletter — Love The Open Letter? Want to build a newsletter just like that for your brand? We can build it with you. Check out Stream.

Startup Community — Join 80+ SA founders in our SA startup founder community called The Open Collab. Weekly online masterclasses, in-person and online meetups and a network like never before.

Until next time,
Elvorne, Renier & Jason

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‍

Wish you were there? For those who missed Metallica’s M72 World Tour performances, you’ll be able to watch an ultra-high-resolution 180-degree video and Spatial Audio immersive recording on Apple Vision Pro from today. The first of many such experiences we don’t get often in SA? 🤘

But first, it’s time for another Fast-Five Friday — 5 things in SA startup you should know. Let’s go…

The Support and the Network

Learn to growth hack like SnapScan, get your brand right like top UK FinTech Monavate and perfect the art of scaling, all while getting connected to 90+ SA founders building innovative startups.

‍

1. HOT (TOPIC) DESKS

The cool desk solution that’s got SA all bothered and hot

Schools (and learners) in underdeveloped areas are up against it…

Crumbling infrastructure, lack of teachers, the many kilometres to cover to and from school daily, etc.

MiDesk is a lightweight (2kg) schoolbag on wheels that converts into a sturdy desk and chair that learners can wheel around to ensure they have a place to do their schoolwork in the classroom, and back at home (many don’t have a place to sit and do homework at home)… 

Made from recyclable materials, MiDesk has several add-ons like a solar light, USB charging portal, reflective stickers and “ruggerised” wheels for rough terrain.

But it’s not been without criticism. 

Everything from why the government hasn't put proper desks in schools, to the bulky size of these wheely desks – too large for small kids, to the sponsors plakking their corporate colours and logos all over it.

Valid points. But if it gives kids one less learning obstacle to overcome, how bad is it really?

Hit reply and tell us what you think…

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2. MAKING WAVES ABROAD

Stocks from your shops

Various finance and investment gurus have told us over the years: “If you’d bought stock in Company ABC for the same amount you spent/spend on their products, you’d become really wealthy…”

Grifin is a US-based adaptive investing platform that lets users automatically buy $1 of stock from the places they shop. 

Users connect their cards to the platform, and at the end of the week, the dollar spend amount is added up, and the investment is allocated to the relevant company as per the rules set by the user. Nifty for users, but no doubt a big data play with all that transaction monitoring.

Back home in SA, there just might be a lekker opportunity for a local startup to build something similar to buy shares from your JSE-listed bank, medical aid, local hospital group, cellphone provider or grocery store, and more…

3. THAT NAGGING FEELING

The local Panda breaking kneecaps (with email)

In a recent survey by QuickBooks, 61% of small businesses struggle with cash flow issues, making it harder for small business owners to pay suppliers, loans, employees, or themselves…

Not only that: a mere 42% of B2B payments in the US happened on time in 2024, with 50% of invoices being past due, and the remaining 8% becoming bad debt…

And the longer an invoice remains unpaid, the higher the likelihood of it becoming bad debt. 

So when we found out someone could do the invoice payments nagging for us (thanks to an Open Collab community member), we rushed to check out Nagging Panda, a local startup that automates your invoice, statement & quote follow-up workflows so your business can get paid in less time with less admin (nagging).

Nagging Panda integrates with Sage, QuickBooks and Xero and was an SA Xero App of the Year finalist for 2024.
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4. MORE SPEED

Slinging properties on WhatsApp

Locking down business leads ASAP is of the essence…

Responding within the first 5 minutes sees 8x higher conversion rates. Even just being the first to respond sees 78% of people go with you.

But how do you reduce response times if your sales teams are on the road?

Local startup Sudonum is building mobile-first lead management solutions, leveraging WhatsApp.

Their real estate solution provides a better experience for both agents and clients, connecting them faster, slicker, and in a more automated way. While agency owners can see key performance metrics, which helps them know every lead is getting taken care of, in as short a time as possible.

They’re currently working on a new Seller Evaluation flow to help agents provide free property evaluations for prospective sellers using a WhatsApp bot flow, too.

Psst… Sudonum’s head of sales, Sebastian Chapman is part of our The Open Collab founder network and recently did a 3 part series on how to do B2B Sales.

Join The Open Collab founder network today and get access to these sessions as well as all our other previous sessions + much more

.

5. FLYING THE ZA STARTUP FLAG

Less red tape, more global growth

SA needs pro-startup legislation to create an environment for startups to flourish and become attractive to buyers (usually from overseas).

The African Union has already developed its “Start Up Model Legal Framework” for member countries.

Back home, the StartUp Act Movement is a collective of investors, incubators, accelerators, and founders working on policies that’ll build a local industry of startups that can achieve maximum value on an international scale.

And we really like their approach. Instead of spending years developing a single, comprehensive piece of legislation, they’re tackling three key themes including:

• Exchange control liberalisation so that offshore holding companies can own their SA operations and hold group intellectual property
• Tax incentives for investment to support startup growth
• Attract talent to SA shores

Our friends at Dommisse Attorneys are one of the entities leading the Startup Act charge, which, once implemented, will no doubt see a major uptick in local startup investment appetite. 

Until then, offshoring to raise funding will remain a reality for many. 

If you’d like to learn more about this, come join our LinkedIn Live event with Dommisse Attorneys and special guest Simon Ellis from Jem as he shares what he learned on their offshoring journey.

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IN SHORT

If you know, you know…

🎓 Hitting the gas on EdTech. Local EdTech accelerator Injini has announced their 3rd cohort of 12 South African startups for the 2025 Mastercard Foundation EdTech Fellowship. *Takes notes in EdTech…

📱Gimme a (Tax) break. In a bid to help connect more low-income South African households to the www, Treasury announced the 9% excise duty on smartphones will be cut for those ones that cost R2’500 or less. Very nice.

🗳️ X marks the spot. This week SA’s Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) held a three-day conference with speakers from Estonia, Namibia and the Democratic Republic of Congo to investigate the feasibility of using an electronic voting system. Interesting…

👩‍💻 SA Tech Poachers. More and more techies from SA are getting poached by international firms with Australia, the Netherlands, Mauritius and the US looking for our top tech talent. Ja, we knew it, hey.

😎 The Stack. Founders need trustworthy tools and suppliers. Our Founder’s Stack includes an easy-to-apply R5M business finance facility from Lula, next-level authority building and lead generation with Stream, and loads more vital startup tools and services.

DON’T MISS THIS

Coming Up in SA’s Most Vibrant Tech Founder Community

Coming up in our members-only, founder community — The Open Collab.

14 March 12:00 — Case Study: Come learn from Jem’s offshoring journey, supported by Dommisse Attorneys to help SA founders build overseas.

18 March 16:00 — Founder Social: Cape Town founders gather for a cold one!

27 March 18:000 — In-Person Event: Our first-ever JHB event is happening — see you there!

28 March 12:00 — Masterclass: How to growth hack in SA with Ben Blaine from Neurabuild.

PLUS: Access all the recordings of our previous sessions including Sales, Products, PR and more.

Join The Open Collab

JOBS IN TECH

Tired already? A change is as good as a holiday…

💼 Product Owner @ Santam Insurance

🤖 Artificial Intelligence Engineer @ TaskFlow

🎨 Product Designer (UX/UI) @ Hey Guys

🔥 Fractional Intern: Content Creation and Social Media @ The Open Letter

Hiring? Get in touch, and we will feature it here.

GAME TIME

Three lies and a startup truth

Only one of these is a real South African startup…

WHAT YOU SAID

Good for business…

On Tuesday, we asked how much you’d pay a lawyer to support your SME’s progress, and most will trade up for AI…

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💸 R0 – My cousin knows a guy (17%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🧐 R5k – Just to say hi? 😭 (12%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ ⚖️ R15k – But it better be gold-plated advice (14%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🚀 Nah, let AI, take the wheel (40%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💡 Wait, I have a better idea… (17%)

Your 2 cents…

Hmm, good idea, Leigh-Anne. Efficiency for the win 🦾.

Nice one, GL. Solid advice there 💡.

Indeed, Thalia, remember to consider all risks before committing 🔒.

Ooh, hope the peeps at Lawyered Up are paying attention, Herman. Awesome idea ✅.

BEFORE YOU GO

Here are 3 Ways We Can Help You

Advertise or Partners — Engage 21 000 South African professionals that read The Open Letter - partner with us or run an ad campaign — Reply to this email to get started.

Build A Newsletter — Love The Open Letter? Want to build a newsletter just like that for your brand? We can build it with you. Check out Stream.

Startup Community — Join 80+ SA founders in our SA startup founder community called The Open Collab. Weekly online masterclasses, in-person and online meetups and a network like never before.

Until next time,
Elvorne, Renier & Jason

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Order in? According to SA media outlets, someone dropped R20k on a single Uber Eats order in 2024, another placed 779 orders and saved themselves R18k by going with Uber One, while the top driver clocked 40’000km (once around the globe) for deliveries. PS: SA’s most searched item on Uber Eats? Crispy fried chicken with pap. Mooi. 🍗

In this Open Letter:

• By the book: The startup giving 2.5M SMEs a legal hand.
• SA’s smart geysers, same city “spyware” & declaring war on dashcams
• Business-friendly: A first port of call when setting up overseas.
• Who recognised the local traffic startup heroes? The results are in.
• Lonely building your startup? Join The Open Collab and get support.

SHOULD YOU OFFSHORE YOUR COMPANY?

Join us this Friday on LinkedIn Live as we chat with Andrea du Toit from Dommisse Attorneys and Simon Ellis from Jem about Jem’s journey—from starting in South Africa to offshoring for fundraising purposes.

RSVP to Join Now

TRENDING NOW

Keeping 2.5M Small Businesses on the Right Side of the Law

In today’s Tuesday Deep Dive, we examine the high costs of compliance for SMEs and ask, shouldn’t we be trying to reduce the cost of doing business…?

SA’s estimated 2.5 to 3.5 million Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) employ 60% of the workforce and make up over 90% of formalised businesses, contributing around 34% of the country’s GDP (R2.4 trillion out of SA’s R7 trillion).

At a conservative estimate of 2 million SMEs, each one must be generating an average of R1.2 million per year – about R100k per month. But start factoring in the costs of running a small business, and it’s that clear cash flow must be tight.

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Coughing up for legal help

Not least of those expenses is compliance – gotta be sure you’re on the right side of the law, or you can’t do business at all.

Especially when you contract with larger corporations. Problem is the legal help for that gets pretty pricey, pretty quickly.

The legal costs rabbit hole goes quite deep: SMEs must deposit R5’000–R15’000 just to get a lawyer to even look at them. And then drawing up a contract alone be an extra R1’000–R5’000 a pop.

Then comes the pro fees: a Junior Counsel starts at around R900 an hour, with Advocates reaching R5’000 an hour. And most are definitely worth it; it’s just unaffordable to many small businesses.

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The local legal AI for the lil guy (and/or gal)...

We’re no strangers to LegalTech (specifically AI) having shared some stories in previous editions like when GPT-4 passed the Bar Exam a mere 3 months after ChatGPT’s launch, or when Bowmans became the first law firm in Africa to integrate the Generative AI platform “Harvey” into its operations…

But these are international solutions, so when we stumbled upon Lawyered Up, a home-grown startup building AI-powered solutions to simplify legal processes for SMEs, we got pretty excited to chat with Serisha Barrat, Lawyered Up’s Co-Founder, about what they’re building….

Lawyered Up automates the document lifecycle with generative AI and natural language processing, and users can sign, store, share, track changes, and interact with documents. It can ask clauses in a document questions in African languages, before generating the final document in English.

Documents can be downloaded in Word or PDF or sent via an in-platform link that does not require the recipient to sign up to Lawyered Up. Handy.

And the platform is currently operational in South Africa, Kenya, Botswana, and Nigeria. With a 70% female-led team with pan-African expertise. Noice.

Plus: They also offer a white-label version for larger corporations that integrate directly into their existing infrastructure. Smart.

But AI in the legal space has not been without pain

In Jan this year, a local law firm found itself in hot water after it used “non-existent legal citations”, obviously generated by a hallucinating AI.

So how does Lawyered Up ensure this doesn’t happen?

One of their measures is employing a Head of Legal in every jurisdiction they operate in to oversee and create documents first and use those to train the AI. The aim is that, over time, the platform should get better and better.

With AI all the rage, and the Legal industry starting to see the potential of what AI tools like Lawyered Up can do, we’re watching this space…

IN SHORT

Strike up a conversation…

🤓 Smart-Geyser Tech Boost. Local IoT for Insurance startup Sensor Networks has locked in a partnership with the world’s largest geyser manufacturer Ariston to bring smart water heating solutions to South African households. We love seeing local tech proudly flying the flag.

🥸 Going Social IRL. Former Twitter Co-Founder Ev Williams is working on a new social media app called Mozi, an app that encourages more in-person meetups by letting you know when you’re in the same city (and event) as a contact in your phone. There’s sometimes a reason you don't want people knowing you’re in the same city, you know…

🤔 Dash Cam Crack Down. Jozi could be introducing a number of new bylaws for drivers with dashcams. This comes in the wake of the newly promulgated by-law regulating the use of private CCTV cameras in Johannesburg. How else we gon’ get epic local pedestrian and cyclist fails now?

🧐 Revolut Rumours Swirling. UK-based FinTech Revolut is rumoured to be setting up ops on local shores. It’s reportedly applied for a full banking license which would make it one of a handful of digital-first banks with full banking status in SA, and comes off the back of a key recent local hire… Hmmm, very interesting…

😎 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with fractional CTO and tech scaling with Octoco, easy-peasy cloud-based accounting software from Xero and 12 more vital startup tools & services.

CHECK THIS OUT

10 Things You Need To Know About the Isle of Man — Our Latest Partner

Apart from the financial and tax perks, of course…

Many companies looking to expand globally make the Isle of Man their first port of call, mainly due to its reputation as a business-friendly jurisdiction with low corporate tax rates, a supportive regulatory environment, and a stable political and economic landscape. They champion founders of all kinds, and that’s why they have partnered with us in our mission.

But did you know…?

‍

1. The Isle of Man is not a Channel Island. It’s an island in the Irish Sea, situated between Ireland, Scotland and England. At 574 square kilometres, it has a much larger land mass than the Channel Islands of Jersey (120 km² ) and Guernsey (62 km² ).

2. In addition to being a tax-neutral Financial Centre of Excellence, the entire Isle of Man is a designated UNESCO Biosphere, recognising its commitment to sustainable development and environmental protection.

3. The Isle of Man is home to the world’s oldest continuous parliament, the Tynwald, which has been running since circa 979 AD.

4. It was the first nation to grant women the right to vote, doing so in 1881, well ahead of many larger democracies.

5. A significant number of South Africans call the Isle of Man home, and around 35 South African businesses have an established presence on the island.

6. Corlett Drive in Johannesburg was named after D.F. Corlett, a builder from the Isle of Man who emigrated to South Africa in the late 1800s. He later served as Mayor of Johannesburg in 1931.

7. The Isle of Man champions innovation and sustainability, hosting the Innovation Challenge every year, focusing on Data, AI, Clean Tech, and FinTech. Last year, South African Cindy van Niekerk won the FinTech category!

8. The Isle of Man is home to the second-largest aircraft registry in the EU, making it a key hub for international aviation.

9. Since 1907, the Isle of Man has hosted the legendary TT Races — a unique motorcycle time trial on public roads that loops through breathtaking countryside and town streets.

10. Famous Manx natives include cycling legend Sir Mark Cavendish and the Bee Gees, who were born and raised on the island.

Discover the Isle of Man for yourself

BUILDING TOGETHER

Happening over at The Open Collab

In the last few days alone, in our online community, we…

• Got some valuable early-stage validation insights 🚀
• Found a handy tool to help SMEs get paid faster.
• Helped Carlos get some insights into company structure outside of SA.
• Helped Justin build out his new startup idea.
• Helped Elijah and Danei pick a lekker newsletter name.
• Welcomed some awesome new members 🕺🪩💃.

Plus: Had a killer in-person event in Stellenbosch last week…

Thinking about joining The Open Collab?

• Supercharge your network in the SA startup landscape — get that introduction, get that customer, or meet that partner.
• Get feedback on your products, services and/or offers from others who have built and are building their own products right now.
• Join all our online and in-person events for free!
• Exclusive 1-on-1 sessions with startup consultants.

SA’s only dedicated tech startup and scale-up founder community.

Join The Open Collab

WHAT YOU SAID

For the robots…

Last Friday, we riddled you about an SA startup helping manage your city’s traffic light maintenance and traffic flow, and only a few recognised Quebit…

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨 🚦 Robo-T (48%)

🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 👮‍♀️ Quebit (12%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🚐 MzansiBot (12%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🛣️ VirKeer (28%)

Your 2 cents…

So here we are messaging Beehive about adding a leaderboard functionality, Elijah 💬. Great idea, though, could be fun 🤗.

BEFORE YOU GO

Here are 3 Ways We Can Help You

Advertise or Partners - Engage 21 000 South African professionals that read The Open Letter - partner with us or run an ad campaign.

Build A Newsletter - Love The Open Letter? Want to build a newsletter just like that for your brand? We can build it with you. Check out Stream.

Startup Community - Join 80+ SA founders in our SA startup founder community called The Open Collab. Weekly online masterclasses, in-person and online meetups and a network like never before.

Until next time,
Elvorne, Renier & Jason

Powered by beehiiv

A little too fuzzy? A de-extinction startup (working to bring back extinct animals) has gene-modified mice with Woolly Mammoth traits and the result is these hairy little guys. They say it’s an important step towards actually bringing Mammoths back. But works as a pretty good PR stunt too. 🦣

Right now, though, it’s time for another Fast-Five Friday — 5 things in startup you should know, let’s go…

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1. TO THE POINT

ESPs Slick AI Catcher-Upperer

Since March last year, our EskomSePush app notifications have been pretty quiet (aside from the 2 recent quick bursts of loadshedding in Jan and Feb this year)...

But what’s been really interesting to see are the community forums launched back in 2019. 

Obviously quite loadshedding-focused at the time, these have morphed to become area-specific community chats about everything from water and power outages in the area to connecting buyers and sellers – even job-finding mechanisms. 

These forums allow users to find what's happening in their immediate area (local WhatsApp groups are hard to find), without their phone number out there for nosy Mrs Jones to get her hands on.

They recently integrated AI into the forums, which keeps an eye out for problematic messages, and provides pretty good summaries of chats, especially when a whole bunch of messages got sent about a hot local topic. Very cool.

‍

2. MAKING WAVES IN AFRICA

Kenya’s Succulent Surf Sesh

Most modern surfboards are made from plastic derivatives, fibreglass and resin, which is great for keeping the boards lightweight, buoyant, and durable. But not so good for the environment…

Something a 30’000 acre sisal agave (succulent) farm in Kenya is looking to change. 

Grow Blanks manufactures 100% organic, biodegradable agave surfboard blanks which can then be exported all over the world to be shaped by hand or with conventional surfboard tools by surfboard makers.

The shaping waste and offcuts are biodegradable or can be used as protective packaging or as spare parts for repairs.

Grow Blank employs 3’000 Kenyans (and houses a community of over 8’000) on the farm. Kenya believe it?

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3. MULTI-AGENT AI

The World’s First AI Dev Team?

Well, it’s happening, multi-Agent AI teams have arrived…

It felt like just a few months ago, building anything remotely technical required a dev shop (big money over a few months). But that might not be the case for long…  

MGX (MetaGPT X) is a multi-agent AI platform based on real software standard operating procedures.

Now you can have access to Dev Team 24/7, comprising AI Team Leader “Mike”, AI Product Manager “Emma”, AI Architect “Bob”, AI Engineer “Alex” and Data Analyst “David”, to create websites, blogs, shops, analytics and games.

Simply enter what you want to build in the chat, and walk away for a coffee while the MGX AI Dev team starts work – ok, it’s actually pretty cool to watch it work. 

‍

4. IN OUR OPEN COLLAB COMMUNITY

Getting SA Ventures to Look the Part

We all build fast, break things and pivot fifteen times a week in the early days. But for every venture idea, there comes that crucial moment when you must choose: Are we gonna let this fizzle or shoot for the moon?

That’s where SA founders like Sabeeha Banubhai from Jack Studios come in. Sabeeha and team have helped over 150+ local and international early-to-growth-stage startups across various industries go from “backyard promise” to market-ready.

Whether it’s:

• Improving their pitch deck
• Building an investor-ready product demo
• Updating their website to reflect brand & value
• Improving user experience & capturing vital user flows
• UI design to make your apps look the part

So, if you or someone you know are in that “we gotta get serious” space, Sabeeha does free 30-minute workshops where they help you discover your current challenges, what’s needed to get it looking pro and if maybe Jack Studios can help.

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PS: Want to build with founders like Sabeeha? She’s part of the Open Collab, our dedicated founder community full of SA’s most daring founders, building exciting startups – come join us.

‍

5. REAPING A HARVEST

SA’s Growing AgriTech Scene

Big news in SA AgriTech this week is that homegrown AgriTech startup Khula has raised another R126 million as part of their still-open Series A round from investors including Absa Bank, PepsiCo’s Kgodiso Fund, AECI and E Squared.

Khula is helping over 15’000 farmers get access to key inputs like chemicals, crop feed and more, at fair prices from more than 100 suppliers to see their crops grow. Farmers can also get expert help with spraying programs and technical support, lock in buyers and get paid faster with crop contracts, and potentially get access to Khula’s funding partners to help farmers (and their produce) grow – all in-app.

The funding will see Khula expand its team and product development capabilities, as well as explore new markets.

Huge congrats Karidas Tshintsholo and the Khula team.

‍

IN SHORT

Convo starters for your weekend plans…

🔌 Power Play. SA Fintech and payments provider Lesaka has acquired local prepaid electricity submetering and payments business Recharger in a deal worth R507 million. The electricity long game has started…

🤖 AI Voiceovers. Amazon’s Prime Video is testing AI-assisted dubbing for selected movies and TV shows in English and Latin American Spanish. It’ll combine AI and human localisation pros for “quality control”. We saw what our AI notetaker did with Afrikaans recently; this could be lekka funny.

🔒 Lock it down. Google Cloud and the National Electronic Media Institute of South Africa (NEMISA) have partnered to bring Google’s Cyber Security Professional Certificate to 12’000 SA students. An awesome opportunity in a majorly trending field.

🛵 Shoprite Sixty60. After a successful pilot in Atlantis, Western Cape, and Jabulani in Soweto, Shoprite Sixty60 will roll out to 19 Shoprite stores across 8 provinces. On the Checkers side — Checkers Sixty60 is now also available on the web. Very nice.

😎 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with all your VC and startup legal sorted by Dommisse Attorneys, your own CFO for a fraction of the cost with OCFO and 12 more vital startup tools & services.

AH CLARITY….

Clarity Builds Confidence. Confidence Drives Growth.

Scaling a business isn’t just about working harder — it’s about working smarter. And that starts with clarity.

Most founders feel like they’re figuring things out as they go. But what if you knew exactly where your business stands, what challenges are normal, and how to break through to the next stage?

That’s what Metavolve’s Lifecycle Guide is for. It lays out the key phases of business growth, the obstacles that come with each stage, and how to navigate them with confidence.

With the right roadmap, you can:

✅ Recognise the real bottlenecks holding you back.

✅ Stop second-guessing yourself and make decisions with conviction.

✅ Lead with confidence knowing you’re on the right path.

The best founders aren’t just ambitious — they’re clear on where they’re going and how to get there.

🚀 Get the Lifecycle Guide and take control of your growth.

Get the Guide Now

DON’T MISS THIS

Coming Up in SA’s Most Vibrant Tech Founder Community

Coming up in our members-only, founder community — The Open Collab.

7 March 12:00 — Masterclass: How to validate early-stage ideas in SA with Thijan Dippenaar from The Delta.

11 March 12:00 — Chat Roulette: Come meet fellow SA founders and engage in startup-building topics.

12 March 10:00 — Office Hours: “Come rate my MVP” - founders giving founders feedback.

18 March 16:00— Founder Social: Cape Town founders gather for a cold one!

21 March 12:00 — Masterclass: How to growth hack in SA with Ben Blaine from Neurabuild.

PLUS: Access all the recordings of our previous sessions including Sales, Products, PR and more.

Join The Open Collab

JOBS IN TECH

One click away from that dream gig…

🗺️ Product Strategy Lead @ FairMoney

📊 Senior Data Analyst @ Gumtree South Africa

🎨 Senior Product Designer @ Zensar Technologies

🌐 Various roles @ fibertime (send an email: applications@fibertime.com)

🚀 Social and Content @ The Open Letter (yep that’s us, we are hiring, send memes)

Hiring? Get in touch, and we will feature it here.

GAME TIME

Riddle us this…

I don’t drive, yet I keep roads clear,

With data and AI, I make traffic steer.

Red, green, and orange, my signals are smart,

I sync them with traffic flow, a real-time art.

WHAT YOU SAID

Outta this world…

On Tuesday, we asked what you’d send into space, and it’s business ideas all the way…

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 👨‍🚀 Me (13%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 😎 Some or other marketing stunt (5%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 👽 A message in a bottle for the aliens (26%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🤑 Something to make a lot of money (39%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 👿 Someone I don’t like (17%)

Missed it? Read about this SA SpaceTech startup doing big things.

BEFORE YOU GO

Here are 3 Ways We Can Help You

• Advertise or Partners — Engage with 21 000 South African professionals that read The Open Letter - partner with us or run an ad campaign — Reply to this email to get started.
• Build A Newsletter — Love The Open Letter? Want to build a newsletter just like that for your brand? We can build it with you. Check out Stream.
• Startup Community — Join 80+ SA founders in our SA startup founder community called The Open Collab. Weekly online masterclasses, in-person and online meetups and a network like never before.
  
  Until next time,
  Elvorne, Renier & Jason

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Smart enough? In the quest for better, faster computing, an Australian startup has launched the world’s first commercial code-deployable biological computer. Using lab-grown human neurons (brain cells) as part of its “chip”, it’s said to be faster and more flexible than most chips used in LLMs. Plus: Apparently, it “evolves” too. 🧠

In this Open Letter:

• Local lift-off: This SA startup helps deliver hundreds of payloads into orbit.
• Fibertime’s Finnish funding, Khula’s AgriTech harvest & mobile solar devices.
• The obvious next move: The real key to strategic business growth.
• What these SA startups should pivot to next: The results are in.
• Lonely building your startup? Join The Open Collab and get support.

‍

TRENDING NOW

The SA Startup Sending 100+ Products Space

The space industry is big business. Not to mention it’s pretty cool. So in today’s Tuesday Deep Dive, we look at one SA startup that’s built up the street cred to fly with Elon and the Right Stuff boys…

Since the launch of the very first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1 on 4 October 1957, we’ve sent thousands of satellites and other objects into space – their numbers growing pretty consistently each year until the boom of 2017 when the total number of annual objects launched doubled from 221 to 456.

It continued in hyperdrive to the 2’664 objects sent into orbit in 2023 alone. 

But building these satellites (or any other product for that matter) that need to function far from Earth, with no opportunity to fix once they are out there (literally one-way missions) and having to withstand extremely harsh circumstances, offers quite a unique set of challenges.

One such challenge is how to manoeuvre the various elements of the satellite in zero gravity to accomplish its mission. Typically, satellites need power – which they normally get from solar panels, but that means you need to remotely or automatically turn the panels towards the sun. 

What’s more, you need to ensure you point cameras or sensors directly towards the satellite’s goal. And, to enable it to send high amounts of data back down to Earth, you need an antenna trained on a specific point on the planet for long enough to perform the transfer (while moving at around 28,800 km per hour in Low Earth Orbit). 

All highly complex and fun stuff, done by the satellite control system.

Moving stuff at Zero gravity

The control system is a highly-specialised component and is a combination of: 

• electronic PC board design
• complex firmware that needs to run on these boards
• mathematical equations and algorithms to modulate the satellite
• complex mechanical bearings and integrations to turn the satellite as it floats in space (i.e it doesn't have a hard surface that it sits on from which it can turn on)
• optical sensors for the satellite to orient itself with where it is (and where it needs to go).

All of these elements also need to feedback to the control system, confirming it’s actually performing as instructed and reporting back on its new orientation etc.  

Complex, multidisciplinary engineering – which means it’s very expensive. What’s more, if this fails out in space, the satellite is gone. Forever.

So no data, no learnings, and nothing to show for months, even years, of work. Eina.

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The unique challenge of building for space

Iterating is a vital part of the learning journey when building tech down here on Earth. Builders need to iterate and improve on mistakes to achieve better results.

But when iteration is extremely costly ($300’000 for a 50kg payload) and time-consuming (you have to stand in line to catch a lift on the next SpaceX mission), getting costs and time-to-launch down while increasing the chance of flight success could be the difference between failure and success in the space industry.

And one way of achieving this is buying an “out-of-the-box” control system out of the box.

This is where this local Stellenbosch-based startup comes in…

The local startup playing in the space

CubeSpace is a local SpaceTech startup specialising in fully integrated Attitude Determination and Control Systems (ADCS) for cubes and microsatellites.

These control systems allow the satellite controller to direct different parts of the satellite to its objectives.

Their suite of products is designed to integrate modularly into their client’s onboard computer, so they can plug and play as many or as few of CubeSpace’s components into their satellite as they want.

Clients provide CubeSpace with their requirements including:

• The size of the satellite.
• The payload.
• The accuracy of where the satellite needs to point and the manoeuvres it needs to be able to perform are crucial.
• How it needs to orbit (believe it or not, different orbits present different challenges).
• Diagrams of what the satellite looks like.

CubeSpace then processes the info through a simulator with models of their components with a proven track record developed over 10 years of flight heritage (350 satellites with over 4k components for 250+ clients globally, including NASA, the European Space Agency, universities, EnduroSat, the UAE Space Agency and more. 

And they’ve just raised their 2nd round of funding, $3 million to scale even further.

With the global space industry bound to hit the $ 1 trillion a year mark by 2030 and $1.8 trillion by 2035, there’s never been a better time to cement oneself as a global leader in space technology. Something CabeSpace is well positioned to become.

We are watching this space…

PS: We’re hosting a fireside chat with CubeSpace CEO Mike-Alec Kearney this Thursday, 6 March 2025 from 6–8 PM at the LaunchLab in Stellenbosch, so you can come and get some out-of-this-world startup-building insights.

Get your tickets on Quicket for R100 (hurry up; there are not many left!)

Buy Ticket

CHECK THIS OUT

Time to Grow: The Next Crucial Step for 2025

Most businesses don’t fail because they have a bad product – they fail because they run out of money…

If you don’t have full visibility into your numbers — your cash flow, margins, payment cycles — you’re making decisions in the dark. 

Fact: You can’t scale what you don’t understand.

Along with Outsourced CFO, we held a workshop two weeks ago on making financial year-end more manageable for startups. One key takeaway was this: 2024 is behind us, but to position yourself for growth in 2025, it's time to gain 100% clarity on your finances.

Why? Because, in order to scale, you need to:

✅ Know exactly where your money is going — every day.
✅ Automate your finances so you can focus on growth, not admin.
✅ Use expert CFO-level insights to plan, forecast, and scale – most investors require it.

Growth Doesn’t Happen by Accident: It’s Designed

🎯 Measure: Are you tracking the key financial numbers that drive growth? OCFO breaks down the metrics that matter.

🎯 Automate: With integrated, automated systems in place, you can streamline your financial processes. Seamlessly connect your bank, payroll, and expenses — so your books stay clean while you scale.

🎯 Strategise: Want to raise funding? Expand? Increase profit? You need CFO-level insights to make smart decisions.

You can’t build a great business on financial guesswork. The sooner you get this right, the faster you can grow.

🚀 Book a free session with OCFO today and take your business to the next level.

Claim your free session now

IN SHORT

Strike up a conversation…

💻 To The Finnish Line. The Finnish Fund for Industrial Cooperation Ltd., finnfund has made a follow-on investment of €2 million to pay-as-you-go fibre provider, the Fibertime Group, to expand its fibre services to new townships and connect more homes. We love to see more SAns get connected…

👩‍🌾 Gooi Mielies. Local AgriTech startup Khula has closed a R126 million funding round from investors, including Absa Bank, AECI, E Squared, and PepsiCo’s Kgodiso Fund to enable financial inclusion and support a new era of farmers. Nice to see AgriTech growth.

☀️ Solar Goes Mobile. This year’s Mobile World Congress saw a number of brands showcasing their solar-powered devices (well, their concept of solar-powered devices) including Infinix’s smartphone and Lenovo’s Yoga Solar PC concept which can charge the notebook via its lid even when the laptop’s not in use. Hopefully, we get these in time for Eskom’s next bout of loadshedding.

🧚‍♀️ H2 Go. FlyH2 Aerospace, a local zero-emissions aviation startup company, has announced that its Dragonfly V prototype uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) is successfully continuing its test program. While it is still being powered by batteries, the UAV is designed to be powered by Hydrogen Fuel cells. Epic.

🎯 The Stack. Founders need trustworthy tools and suppliers. Our Founder’s Stack includes an easy-to-apply R5M business finance facility from Lula, next-level authority building and lead generation with Stream, and loads more vital startup tools and services.

BUILDING TOGETHER

Happening over at The Open Collab

In the last few days alone, in our online community, we…

• Got the ultimate startup PR playbook in our exclusive masterclass on Friday!
• Got a sweet new community platform with resources, tools, recordings and even our own mini startup marketplace 💃🏻🕺🏽.
• Everyone got 10% off any luxury eco-stay, getaway or holiday anywhere in the country (thanks, Lara!).
• Met 20+ SA startups, scale-ups and tech companies — usually with direct access to the founder.
• Helped Danie with feedback and loads of use cases for his new AI project.
• Helped Carlos flesh out an idea for building authority and visibility for ventures.
• Discovered 2 high-powered AI web design tools 😎.
• Mused about what’s more important: doctor’s orders or your daily cuppa…

Thinking about joining The Open Collab? There's never been a better time

On top of all the normal weekly benefits, we have now launched our community repository featuring all our recorded masterclasses, a community directory and other useful tools for building your startup.

From mastering B2B sales, building great products and raising funding, there is something for everyone.

Come join SA’s only dedicated tech startup and scale-up founder community today!

Join The Open Collab

WHAT YOU SAID

More with less…

Last Friday, we asked what pivot these SA startups could make next, and everyone wants to see Bank Zero get into decluttering…

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🍉 Melon Mobile — Watermelon deliveries in summer (8%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ 🧗 Yebo Fresh — Outdoor adventure tours (31%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ ⚡️ Zapper — AI-powered mosquito control service (28%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 📦 Bank Zero — A marketplace for decluttering minimalists (33%)

Your 2 cents…

Oh, yes, we can see it now, William — drones and the works 🦟⚡︎😎

BEFORE YOU GO

Here are 3 Ways We Can Help You

Advertise or Partners - Engage with 20 000 South African professionals that read The Open Letter - partner with us or run an ad campaign.

Build A Newsletter - Love The Open Letter? Want to build a newsletter just like that for your brand? We can build it with you. Check out Stream.

Startup Community - Join 80+ SA founders in our SA startup founder community called The Open Collab. Weekly online masterclasses, in-person and online meetups and a network like never before.

Until next time,
Elvorne, Renier & Jason

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Hungry? A team from Washington is working on a way to grow food in the dark. The new tech called electro-agriculture uses electrolysis to replace a plant’s need for sunlight and even soil. Here’s to a future of space farming.

But first, it’s time for another Fast-Five Friday — 5 startups in 5 minutes, let’s go…

First time reading? Join {{active_subscriber_count}} South African professionals and sign up.

Together with:

1. TAP DANCE

Tapping Into Better Water Quality

SA’s water quality standards are not in a good space.

Since 2020, the municipal water supply systems have taken a bit of a beating with the number of “Good” systems dropping from 70 to 59 in 2024. The number of “Poor” systems, on the other hand, has jumped from 39 to 57 in the same period.

So who knows what’s coming through your taps into your drinking water?

Local water subscription service Solvd is providing a way for South Africans to ensure they’re getting clean water into their homes. Solvd sediment and carbon filtration systems do this right out the gates, or you can opt for a system with 2’000l+ of backup water for those times when water gets shut off for extended periods. 

They also offer annual water quality tests, regular filter replacements, and added components such as an additional tank or 3-stage filtration.

2. RAPID EXPANSION

Our Biggest Exit Yet?

Big news coming out of the local startup scene this week is the acquisition of RapidDeploy by Motorola Solutions. The deal has been described as a “landmark” and one of SA’s largest tech exits by its investor HAVAIC.

What started out as an idea by 2 South Africans Steven Raucher (a volunteer on the NSRI’s Rescue Crew), and Brett Meyerowitz (a volunteer Community Medic), RapidDeploy is active in 24 states across the US offering first responders and emergency services a full suite of powerful, cloud-enabled products.

These include Radius Mapping for real-time, precise location tracking, Lighting an emergency info app for first responders, and Eclipse Analytics to measure call response times and staffing optimiser based on call volumes – all in the name of getting first responders to the people who need them in the shortest time possible.

Check out RapidDeploy’s origin story…

Join RapidDeploy's cofounders, Steven Raucher and Brett Meyerowitz, as they reveal the powerful origin story of our company. Hear firsthand why RapidDeploy…

vimeo.com/374944144

3. HOLIDAY SOUVENIRS

Year-Round Revenue For Holiday Hotspots…

Few industries get hit by changing economic winds like the hospitality industry…

It’s highly seasonal, tourism numbers fluctuate when times are tough, holidays and leisure are one of the first things to go, and freak events put a serious spanner in the works: Just think back to the 2nd round of Covid travel bans to SA when Cape Town alone suffered loses to the tune of R200 million per day. 

What if hotels, lodges, resorts, guesthouses, or BNBs could find ways to make money throughout the year by tapping into the nostalgia of visiting guests and setting up their own storefronts for guests to buy products and services directly to their guests?

Well, furbsh is a brand new startup that seems to think there’s something there. Anything from wine to locally made arts and curios (Africa has some seriously lekker stuff that local and international tourists absolutely love) that can be shipped directly to your guest's rooms, or to their home if it’s a little big to fit in their suitcases. And while it’s still very early days for furbsh, we’re definitely watching this space.

The founder of furbsh, Carlos Ferraz, is part of our The Open Collab Community.

Do you want to build with founders like Carlos? Join our community today!

Join The Open Collab

4. UP IN AFRICA

Fighting The Fake Pharma Fight

Fake meds are enough to get your blood pressure through the roof – especially if the meds you’re taking are meant to lower it, turn out to be fake.

Fake and ineffective meds are a big problem globally with 250k children dying worldwide every year from taking counterfeit meds – 300 in the last year from fake cough and pain syrups alone.

Not to mention a continent like Africa with its malaria infection rates, seeing nearly 90% of antimalarials in some markets reported as fake.

These fake pharmaceuticals have devastating consequences. Something Adebayo Alonge the CEO and Founder of RxAll experienced when he fell into a 21-day coma after taking fake meds he bought from his local pharmacy in Nigeria.

This experience led him to start RxAll which built the RxScanner a device using AI and machine learning technology to check and confirm drug quality.

5. AN EVENT YOU CAN’T MISS

Founder Fireside Stories

Not many South African startups manage to scale globally, let alone beyond our planet, but CubeSpace is shooting for the moon!

Join Mike Kearney, Co-Founder and CEO of CubeSpace, for an in-person fireside chat with Renier Kriel at LaunchLab in Stellenbosch, where we’ll unpack the journey of a South African startup that beat the odds to become a global space-tech leader.

In this fireside chat, we will discuss:

• How CubeSpace scaled from a university spinout to a global deep-tech leader
• What it takes to raise international funding in South Africa
• Scaling a hardware business for a global market
• Winning major international clients like NASA and ESA
• Lessons on scaling, investment, and building a globally competitive tech company

PLUS: a whole lot of networking with The Open Letter Community.

Tickets are selling fast, so get yours now.

Buy Tickets Now

IN SHORT

🩲 Shorter shorts for a Fast Friday…

⭐ Time to Shine. Are you ready for Innovation City’s 2025 Startup of The Year Awards? If you’re a startup younger than 5 years, with an MVP and want all the glitz, glory, exposure and startup support you can handle — enter here.

🌊 Keep it Flowing. Flow48, a FinTech in the SME lending space has just concluded its $69 million Series A round. $10 million of that is earmarked for scaling its SA operations. Nice.

🔌 Charging Freebies. Volvo SA is offering its new EV owners a 2-year charging voucher linked to the GridCars charge card valued at R12’000, R7’500 towards a GridCars wall box for home charging, and 3 years of 10GBs of free Vodacom data. Wow.

🍿 Oscar Buzz. There’s been a rise in online scams in the lead-up to Sunday night’s Academy Awards. Posing as a streaming service for Oscar movies, these sites are stealing people’s personal and financial data. LOL.

🤝 Going Green in CT. Cape Town has landed a cool R2.9 billion from Germany’s KFW Development Bank. This takes the Mother City another step closer to its green energy switch and a step further from Eskom reliance. Love.

😎 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with your own CTO for remarkable tech builds with Octoco, your own CFO for a fraction of the price with OCFO and 12 more vital startup tools & services.

CHECK THIS OUT

Unlocking Growth? You Need a Solid Foundation

SME owners already know the pain of financial year-end: the last-minute reconciliations, scrambling for missing invoices, and the tax headaches. 

But what if this could be the year it all changes?

Last week, we partnered with Xero and OCFO to show founders exactly how to make financial year-end effortless. We broke some of the first few steps down into:

✅ Build a rock-solid financial foundation — without the overwhelm.
✅ Automate accounting so your books stay clean year-round.
✅ Use Xero’s seamless integrations to cut down admin and boost clarity.

The takeaway? When you have full visibility into your numbers, financial year-end isn’t a panic — it’s a breeze. And it’s only once you’ve laid that foundation that you can start thinking strategically about your business.

Getting down to it

🎯 Measure: How solid is your financial foundation? OCFO’s experts shared the key numbers every business owner must track.

🎯 Automate: Xero connects seamlessly with your bank, payroll, and expenses — so you can stop chasing invoices and start making strategic decisions.

🎯 Iterate: Like any great business, financial management is about continuous improvement. And the right software makes that easy.

Don’t wait for next year to do things differently. Get your books in order now — and take the financial stress off your plate.

🚀 Get 90% off Xero for 3 months when you sign up today. This offer expires tonight.

Claim my 90% off right now

DON’T MISS THIS

Coming Up in SA’s Most Vibrant Tech Founder Community

Coming up in our members-only, founder community — The Open Collab.

28 Feb 12:00 — Masterclass: Tech PR 101: Building Buzz Without Big Budgets by Jo Eyre from Voxeon Communications.

7 March 12:00 — Masterclass: How to validate early-stage ideas in SA with Thijan Dippenaar from The Delta.

21 March 12:00 — Masterclass: How to growth hack in SA with Ben Blaine from Neurabuild.

PLUS: Weekly office hours, online chat roulette and in-person coffee and drinks gatherings.

Join The Open Collab

JOBS IN TECH

Hot off the Jobs press…

🏗️ Product Developer @ Ninety One

👩‍💻 Senior Software Engineer @ Confluence

🎨 Financial Wellness Design Lead @ Old Mutual South Africa

💼 Business Development Consultant @ Outsourced CFO

Hiring? Get in touch, and we will feature it here.

GAME TIME

3 Startup Lies and a Truth

WHAT YOU SAID

Proof of life…

On Tuesday, we asked about important documents you’re always scrambling for when applying for finance, and proof of address is by far the hairiest…

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🪪 Copy of ID (9%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🏡 Proof of address (54%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💰 Payslips (9%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📰 Proof of life (17%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📂 All of these... (11%)

Your 2 cents…

Spoken like a true straight-outta-college founder, Danei. But yeah, pay yourself a salary before applying for finance to save yourself from turning grey before 30. 👵

Ha ha, yes, pretty sure if financial products were as easy to buy as airtime, we’d have a much more prosperous society. 🤑

Hopefully initiatives like Umazi will start making these kinds of things easier for you real soon, Neo. 💪

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Feeling lucky? Not like this Polish guy who found a piece of a SpaceX rocket in his garden, more like us buying you a coffee to start your day… That’s right if you get 2 of your friends to sign up for The Open Letter before Friday 8 AM — simply send them your unique referral link — and we’ll send you a 40 bucks Vida voucher. Give the gift of The Open Letter to your mates now.

(PS: Don’t cheat — we can tell.)

In this Open Letter:

• Big play: The startup rolling out tech to ease all your KYC pains.
• Accelerating OceanTech, Prosus’ takeaway splurge & coming off the Greylist.
• Room to grow: How to get the cash-flow support you need to make it in SA.
• Who knew (and didn’t know) the local dev boys? The results are in.
• Lonely building your startup? Join The Open Collab and get support.

Together with Lula:

‍

‍

TRENDING NOW

Taking the Pain Out of KYC

If you’ve ever applied for a financial product or service in your personal capacity, you’ll know they want to see a quarter of a million documents before anything gets done.

Now, most of them are your standard KYC (Know Your Customer) to ensure the FSP (Financial Service Provider) is FICA (Financial Intelligence Centre Act) compliant. But if you’re applying for a financial service outside of SA, it takes even more paperwork. 

And to make matters worse, these institutions are required by law, to have updated documentation. This means they will hunt you down over time and ask you to provide the same documents again, just in an updated format.

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Not only for individuals

These painful processes aren’t limited to individuals. In fact, it’s even worse for companies:

Multiple bank accounts and products at different providers, statutory duties, and registering as a supplier with a large organisation or government all require different types of documentation.

Trading in Europe? From June 2024 onwards, companies must perform due diligence on suppliers to identify, prevent, and mitigate adverse human rights and environmental impacts across their supply chains. This is part of the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD).

All of which means more requests for documents – or, shall we say, more requests for the same kind of documents, from more companies. 

Compliance’s price tag

All of this compliance has good intentions…

Limit the flow of funds to terrorists, sanctioned individuals, abusers of human rights and those that are grossly negligent with the environment and, importantly, prevent fraud:

• In 2023, an estimated R23 trillion in illicit funds flowed through the global financial system, encompassing activities such as money laundering, human trafficking, drug trafficking, and terrorist financing. 
• Fraud has seen a dramatic rise, with a reported 1,400% increase over the past decade. 
• In 2023 alone, global losses from fraud scams and bank fraud schemes amounted to R8.9 trillion.

And while added levels of compliance will likely contribute to combatting these scourges, it comes at a price. In the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, financial crime compliance costs have reached R1.5 trillion, with 98% of financial institutions reporting increased expenses in this area. 

It’s estimated that executing a compliance check in Europe can cost anything between R18k to R183k per customer (depending on the level of depth and complexity) for regulated institutions. On the flip side, clients of these banks are often subjected to multiple, outdated and largely manual requests for compliance, like British Telecom, which has a team of over 200 people responding to due diligence checks. So, the problem is dual-sided.

Anything that can simplify this process to reduce costs and speed up time to execute, could be a real game changer for companies. 

The SA female founder are making a play

South African-born Cindy van Niekerk saw the massive overhead that compliance introduced when she worked at some of the world’s biggest banks and financial institutions in the UK. This led to her founding Umazi. James Deely, a seasoned banking COO and Michael Harvie CRO (another South African) comprise the founding team.

Umazi is pioneering decentralised, collaborative due diligence to speed up corporate identity verification. It allows companies of all sizes to create digital identities coupled with a repository of documents – these documents and declarations then only need to be verified once after which it can be shared (with permission from the owner) with companies requesting it. The regulated organisations benefit from the reuse of verified data, as they will be notified in real-time of any data changes and updates. This process can solve problems like re-FICA.

Cutting the cost of due diligence by sharing verification among different participants all while improving the speed at which checks can be done.

And they have made some great progress. 

Having won the Digital Isle of Man innovation challenge in 2024 (btw: entries for 2025 are now open, so check it out), Umazi is set to run a pilot with the island to create digital identities for newly created companies. They’ll perform standard due diligence and then supply data straight from the organisation’s Umazi-created digital Identity – cutting out all those tedious document processes.

It’s something that could change the game for virtually every business on the planet. We’re watching this space…

CHECK THIS OUT

Helping SA Businesses Keep the Cash Flowing

If you run a growing business in South Africa, you know the challenge: You need cash to scale — but growth often eats up your working capital. 

Whether you’re expanding locations, launching new products, or handling increased demand, cash flow gaps can stall progress when you can least afford it.

That’s where Lula steps in.

Lula provides quick, flexible funding solutions tailored to South African businesses. No long waits. No rigid conditions. Just the capital you need — when you need it — to keep moving forward.

See it in action

Take Off the Gluten Path, a fast-growing gluten-free food brand. Founder Bronwyn Phillips needed cash to test new retail spaces and expand their nationwide frozen food delivery. 

Traditional financing options were slow and restrictive — but Lula was different. 

With Lula’s funding:

✅ The application process was quick and easy.
✅ Approval was fast, with no unnecessary red tape.
✅ Funds were available when needed, giving Bronwyn the freedom to use them where they mattered most.

This kind of financial flexibility helped Off the Gluten Path grow without compromising its mission to serve customers who truly need safe, gluten-free options.

Your business could be next. 

Need to bridge a cash flow gap or fund your next big move?

See how Lula can help

IN SHORT

Strike up a conversation…

🛟 Ocean Rescues. The 6th edition of OceanHub’s accelerator programme is open for applications. The 12-month programme will help as many as 24 African startups working on preserving and restoring the world’s oceans. Applications close 30 June 2025 — apply here. Hmmm, any startups doing something about the Milnerton Lagoon?

🚨 Rapidly Acquired. RapidDeploy was recently acquired by Motorola. The startup was founded in Cape Town in 2016 and built a cloud-based emergency response and analytics platform. After major global traction, the startup moved to Texas, USA in 2018 and have gone on to service 1’600+ emergency communications centres. Another big win for the Saffa startup community!

🥡 Meals on Wheels. Naspers’ Prosus just picked up Just Eat Takeaway for a tasty $4.3 billion. The acquisition forms part of Prosus CEO Fabricio Bloisi’s rapid expansion plans for the group. The Uber Eats competitor operates in 17 markets around the world serving 61 million eaters. Wonder if the service would be expanded into SA?

👽 HD Space. NASA is launching a brand new telescope capable of creating the most colourful map of the cosmos in history. The infrared SPHEREx telescope takes spectroscopic images and will help scientists understand how the universe was formed, how galaxies have grown throughout cosmic history, and the location of water molecules anywhere in the galaxy. Now we gon see some things…

👏 Out of the Grey? South Africa has addressed (or at least largely addressed) 20 out of 22 action items set out by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and could see us be delisted from the FATF greylist in October if the remaining items — investigations and prosecutions of serious and complex money laundering, and terror-financing activities — are addressed in the next reporting period, March to June. *Cue the Start of a Slow Clap…

😎 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with next-level business strategy support from Metavolve, all your VC and startup legal sorted by Dommisse Attorneys and 12 more vital startup tools & services.

BUILDING TOGETHER

Happening over at The Open Collab

In the last few days alone, in our online community, we…

• Tested out a new platform with all kinds of tool kits, recordings and exclusive value-adds for the Collab 🤩.
• Helped Brandon get the ultimate remote exec PA service.
• Had a session on how to make financial year-end easy — with CFOs.
• Discussed who is the best type of person to help develop your products.
• Checked out the back-end setup of Gemin’s new AI co-pilot for science.
• Had a lekker laugh learning that even Paul Graham’s teens won’t listen to him.
• Put Chris in contact with a potentially valuable partner 🚀.
• Hooked Christian up with some quality door-to-door package services.
• Gave Danei some helpful feedback on their awesome new website.

Thinking about joining The Open Collab?

• Supercharge your network in the SA startup landscape — get that introduction, get that customer, or meet that partner.
• Get feedback on your products, services and/or offers from others who have built and are building their own products right now.
• Join all our online and in-person events for free!
• Exclusive 1-on-1 sessions with startup consultants.

SA’s only dedicated tech startup and scale-up founder community.

Join The Open Collab

HAPPENING SOON

Upcoming Event

6 March 2025 — First Open Letter In-Person Event of 2025: Come meet us and the entire community at LaunchLab in Stellenbosch for another legendary Open Letter event — R100 per person (buy here) or free to members of The Open Collab community.

WHAT YOU SAID

Got devs?

Last Friday we riddled you an SA scale-up that helps corporates and other ventures get their software teams sorted with SA’s top talent. And almost everyone recognised good-ole OfferZen…

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💼 DevSouth (8%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🛡️ DevProtect (8%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 👨‍💻 OfferZen (72%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💳 HireADev (12%)

Your 2 cents…

We always try our best, thanks! 🙌

Gulp, thanks for the heads up, MrShenery. From now on, you know where to find us 🎣.

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Bodyguards? No problem: One of the latest products on the Apple Store is Protector, an app that lets you book armed agents — choose from US military vets to special forces, use sliders to add armed convoys or motorcades and all kinds of crazy options. No wonder the startup’s co-founder calls it, “Uber, but with guns”.

Back in SA, though, it’s another Fast-Five Friday: 5 things you should know in SA startup, in 5 minutes — let’s go!

Together with:

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1. TO THEIR CREDIT

Giving 27M South Africans Economic Access

We feature awesome SA FinTech startups in The Open Letter all the time – some of them aiming to serve folks in SA’s informal economy.

But did you know nearly 27 million people (45% of the population) in SA are credit unserved or underserved? They have no credit score, so they can’t buy a house, a car, or even stuff like laptops and cameras on credit. 

Eek! This means 45% of SA’s populace is locked out of the economy – and you wonder why it’s not always growing as fast as we’d like…

But, local startup Pokkit is fixing this by helping these credit-unserved folks build up their credit score with savings investments: The user buys a Redeemable Savings Voucher and pays between R100 and R4k per month for 12 or 24 months.

This info gets sent to all the major credit bureaus to improve their credit score, and at the end of the 12/24 months, users have a tidy little savings amount they can withdraw (after some hopefully lekker 7% growth in Allan Gray’s Money Market Fund). 

2. CONNECTING THE DOTS

Find Hot, Open Tables in Your Area…

There’s nothing worse than owning a restaurant, bar, or cafe that stands empty after the breakfast coffee run, or between the lunchtime or dinner rush. You’re not making money, your waitstaff isn't making money, and with all those overheads, it’s costing you to keep the doors open...

SA is fast becoming a popular destination for digital nomads. Since many of these people do not have an office, they need a space to plug in, lock-in, and get to work.

After much success in the UK, Reef App is now available in SA. Reef App connects the globe’s laptop force with laptop-friendly restaurants, bars and cafes in their local area. Reef members can get a spot to work with varying amenities ranging from Wi-Fi and electricity (obvs) to coffee and brekkie to fuel the hustle (plus a few more bespoke venue-dependant perks).

Restaurants, on the other hand, have a great way to drive foot traffic to their tables during off-peak times. Mooi.

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3. COME FLY WITH ME

Building Faster than the Speed of Sound

Not since the iconic Concorde (shelved in 2003 due to high operating costs) have regular air passengers traveled at supersonic speeds.

But with the recent push to commercialise space travel, could supersonic passenger travel be back on the cards?

Yeah, about that startup that went supersonic the other day: In this recent interview with Y-Combinator, founder Blake Scholl shares the story about Boom Supersonic’s future plans: The Overture will be a supersonic airliner to transport around 65 passengers at Mach 1.7, running on 100% sustainable fuel by 2029.

And apart from being at the cutting edge of technology and engineering, Blake shares some incredible insights from his founder journey including fixing the economic issues with Concorde, finding the right people (starting with a guy who played hockey with some dude who worked at SpaceX), and navigating qualitative claims about quantitative topics.

Can you imagine a 45-minute flight from Jozi to Cape Town?

4. FROM OUR OPEN COLLAB COMMUNITY

Get Rewarded in Gold…

Gold prices just keep on rising, with the precious metal hitting an all-time high – returning over 40% this year in Dollars and Rands. It’s also seeing an uptick in interest (even Elon wants to take a peek at the real Gold sitch at Fort Knox).

We’re living in funny old times when age-old assets like gold are being digitised at breakneck speed, yet traders in London are having to physically empty out the Bank of England’s gold vaults in order to fly bullion bars to COMEX repositories in America. 

And it’s at this intersection that we think our friends over at Troygold could very well be on to something with the launch of their digital gold API (dubbed GoldSave) late last year.

The API allows third-party digital platforms to offer their customers retail gold directly within their existing apps. Powered by Troygold’s technology and RMB Bank gold custody, digital players can seamlessly integrate fractional gold savings and allow their users to turn their rewards and loyalty points offerings into cold, hard Krugerrands.

The Troygold team claims that speed in adding digital products is key and hence the gold API can be integrated seamlessly by a mid-level dev in under a week. A quick way to add an additional revenue stream, earning 2% on gold transactions and a share of the monthly AUM fees.

The DigiGold API is already powering some of SA’s ⁠large remittance platforms, ⁠digital voucher players, a ⁠telco super app, and more coming on stream…

Keen to build with Founders like Troygold’s Dane Viljoen? Join our community of SA Startup Founders & Builders, The Open Collab today.

5. NOW OR NEVER

All the Big Health Corporates & Investors in One Place

Hey, HealthTech founders, ever wish you could get into a room full of corporates and investors who’re super passionate about growing SA’s HealthTech sector?

Here’s your shot: The legends over at Octoco are bringing together local and international HealthTech experts and putting them into a room for you to meet and mingle.

The panellists alone give you an idea of the calibre of people who're gonna be there:

• Richard Gordon – South Africa Medical Research Council
• Aurélie Ette Askia – Senior Investment Manager: Sanofi
• Esté Burger – BioCode
• Dr Anton Du Preez van Staden – Fluorobiotech
• Thomas Kisimbi – Boston Consulting Group
• Fanie Hattingh – Mediclinic

The topic? Emerging trends in AI, digital health, and groundbreaking technologies shaping Africa’s healthcare future.

Plus: Alongside the panel, African and local startups get a chance to showcase cutting-edge products through exhibition booths, fostering collaboration and investment opportunities with industry leaders.

Scaling HealthTech Innovation in Africa

🌍 HealthTech Expo | Panel Discussion | Networking
📅 Date: 27th February 2025 | 🕒 Time: 18:30 - 21:00
📍 Location: Workshack, Stellenbosch | Moderator: OST | Octoco
Organised as part of: BRAIN Regional Bootcamp 4th edition (so very startup-friendly)

🎟️ Tickets: FREE but limited…

Register now on Quicket

IN SHORT

Made to share…

🪡 Stitched back together. Local online payments solution WigWag is heading back to the Stitch stable after it spun out from Stitch in 2023, and returns as Stitch Express. Stitch Express will serve businesses that operate on e-commerce platforms to integrate online payments like card payments, Apple and Google Pay, Capitec Pay, BNPL and more coming soon. Lekker one folks.

🚀 Time is Now. Wanna rocket your startup onto the international stage? The Isle of Man is inviting SA startups to apply for its 3rd annual Innovation Challenge. Successful applicants get access to world-class mentors and potential investors within their ecosystem. The winners unlock everything you need to take this thing global — apply here.

🤖 Google’s Co-Scientist. Google just announced its AI co-scientist built on Gemini 2.0 to help scientists create novel hypotheses and research plans. The collaborative AI tool lets researchers specify their research goal using natural language, and the AI co-scientist will propose hypotheses, summarise relevant published literature and recommend approaches. Check out the link for an infographic explainer of the workflow — it’s pretty cool.

🔪 Slashing our cash? Four of South Africa’s major banks (Absa, Standard Bank, Nedbank, and FNB) shut down 238 ATMs between them over the December 2023 and June 2024 period, bringing the total number of ATM closures from June 2023—June 2024 to 400. Capitec on the other hand opened UP almost as many between February 2024 and August 2024 — a respectable 367 new ATMs. Well, looky here…

🛑 11th Hour Budget Delay. Shortly before SA’s Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana was set to deliver the country’s budget speech on Wednesday afternoon (where it was expected he would announce a 2% VAT increase), it got delayed to the 12th of March. Apparently, other members of the GNU had not heard about the increase in previous briefings for “fear of it being leaked”. Awkies.

🔥 Easy-Peasy FYE. Where all the founders at? Stressed to the nines because it’s financial year-end time. But it doesn’t have to be so stressful: We got some of the best CFOs in the business together to come show you how to take the stress out of your FYE — register for free here.

JOBS IN TECH

Room to grow…

🤖 AI Product Manager @ Fuse Universal

🌐 Head of Network Engineering (Path to Chief Network Engineer) @ fibertime

🖊️ Mid-Senior Digital Designer @ Ogilvy One

🍲 eCommerce Manager @ Le Creuset

Hiring? Get in touch, and we will feature it here.

GAME TIME

Think you know your SA startups?

Lines of logic, dreams in flow,

Building futures, byte by byte.

From dev to startup, watch them grow,

Matching talent, left and right.

A bridge between the minds that build,

And those who dream of tech fulfilled.

WHAT YOU SAID

That one-day feeling…

On Tuesday, we asked about your ultimate retirement plan, and being financially free to travel’s the one to beat…

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🏝️ Move to Mauritius (6%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🛶 Go off-grid and live off the land (18%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 💰 Be financially free and travel the world (37%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🐟 Spend my days fishing & golfing (5%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🏡 Stay put and finally enjoy my home (10%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 😬 Wait, people actually retire? (24%)

Your 2 cents…

Here’s to Pieter, one day living it up like royalty 👑.

Ha ha, ja GL, some people can’t help it — retire them to a desert island and they’ll open a glass-making factory or something 💎.

Hey African Box, at the normal returns of 7-10% per year, yeh you’d have to invest like R5k+ per month. But last year’s best-performing ETFs were insane: Sygnia Itrix MSCI USA did 20%, 1nvest SWIX 40 did 27.8%, NewGold ETF and Satrix MSCI China both did like 40% returns. At rates like those, you’d only have to invest R500 per month from age 35 to 65 to accumulate R7 million. So never say never 🏆.

Sounds like a gift, Isaac! Here’s hoping you can at least do some of that in the meantime too 🎁.

Ooh, Charmaine, stop it — now we wanna come visit ⛳.

Smart, Benjamin, we taking notes… 💡

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Enough growth? We hit a major milestone this weekend: 20k+ subs and counting — here’s a special message from us to you. To celebrate, though, we’re making this Friday’s startup webinar free for everyone. We gathered some seriously top-shelf CFOs to come show us how to take the stress out of financial year-end. And your seat’s already booked — confirm it here.

In this Open Letter:

• Big play: The startup helping funds and consumers get more out of retirement.
• African AI marketplace, electrifying medicine & your startup on the global stage.
• Legacy starts here: How to build real generational wealth, right now.
• Who knew this cool local aero-agri startup? The results are in.
• Lonely building your startup? Join The Open Collab and get support.

Together with:

Did someone forward you this email? Join {{active_subscriber_count}} South Africans reading The Open Letter by signing up here.

TRENDING NOW

Securing Comfy SA Retirements

It seems like retirement has been on everyone's lips the last couple of months (and not just cause they’re ready to pack it all in and head to Mauritius)...

We’ve featured a couple of startups in the financial planning space in the last few months (ICYMI: DoshGuide and Fynbos). Then, on 1 September 2024, SA’s two-pot retirement system kicked in, allowing South Africans to withdraw a portion of their retirement funds before actually retiring.

SA’s first big retirement regulation changes

Back in the day, large companies would just source a pension fund, sign their employees up to it and pay their monthly contributions over to it. 

At 65, they’d gooi a lekker tea, maybe a card signed by everyone, sign a stack of paperwork and retirees would ride off into the sunset with (hopefully) a lekker nest egg to support them into old age.

Then in August 2017, former Minister of Finance Malusi Gigaba signed some amendments to the Pension Funds Act into law, requiring, among others, a “retirement benefits counselling” component, forcing pension funds to provide counselling and ongoing support to individual fund members. 

This meant that funds had a greater responsibility for the financial outcomes of each member. Nice!

Well, maybe not for everyone…

This created several challenges for most funds…

This approach is less “here’s your money and good luck” and more about taking responsibility for members’ retirement outcomes. And most funds were simply not equipped to suddenly offer that level of granular support to their massive member bases.

In fact, we have to remember that there was virtually no prior relationship between funds and their members – most funds had never even communicated with members, except through numerous intermediaries on both the fund and business’s sides.

So you can imagine this had two drastic effects on SA pensions:

1. Members still had no clue how to make sense of their financial planning
2. Trying to offer his granular level of support came with a hefty price tag for the funds, threatening their own operability…

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The local player bringing transparency to pensions

Local startup Benefit Counsellor is bringing greater clarity around SA pensions by giving funds access to a purpose-built retirement engagement platform. Here, they can provide members with the most up-to-date retirement info and offer them financial education – all via WhatsApp.

What’s more, it’s white-labelled, meaning Mr & Mrs Fund doesn’t need to worry about losing their brand identity: They simply customise the backend benefits portal so that it looks and feels like their own brand. Clever.

And, of course, this means more transparent data: Members can access all their statements (including contributions, balances, statements and other benefits and rewards) via WhatsApp, live chat, chatbots, USSD or email.

Moreover, apart from the platform’s lightly gamified financial education elements, members also have access to virtual counselling with brokers and experts. Noice!

Financial well-being and wealth-building are major parts of building a better, more prosperous South Africa. So anyone working to help both the consumer and service providers do better and gain more are winners in our books. We’re watching this space…

PS: Benefit Counsellors was founded by Jaco Wasserfall, who is one of more than 50 local founders in our Open Collab Community. Come join in and build with founders like Jaco.

CHECK THIS OUT

The easiest way to build generational wealth

Not born into a rich family? Your child could be… 

In startups, early traction makes all the difference. 

It’s the same with building wealth: The earlier you start investing, the bigger the compounding effect of growth. That’s why our friends at Fynbos Money fast-tracked their most-requested wealth-building feature: Tax-Free Savings Accounts for kids.

Fynbos Money’s TFSAs for kids lets you start investing a small amount now, for big rewards for your little ones later in life.

How big?

Well, if your child is 6 years old and you invest R3 000 per month (the max on a TFSA per year: R36 000), at just a 9.4% annual return, they’ll have:

• R 801 thousand by age 18
• R 1.14 million by age 21
• R 2.65 million by age 30

Sheez! Bet you could’ve used a milly by age 21. Your child doesn’t have to wait for it – imagine being remembered as the grandparent who left future generations the gift of wealth.

But here’s the thing: When you start really matters.

Waiting too long hurts

The same investment grows or shrinks depending on when you start:

• Starting at age 16 yields R230k by age 21
• Starting at age 6 yields R1.14 million by age 21
• Starting at birth yields R1.51 million by age 21

Starting just 6 years earlier or later could make 5x the difference (about half a million Rand) and nearly triple their wealth by age 30.

So check out kids' TFSAs at Fynbos right now

IN SHORT

Well, lookie here…

🛒 Go shopping for AI. Africa’s first AI marketplace Highwind has launched, offering ready-to-use AI solutions with flexible pricing options to help businesses get their hands on quick, affordable, and scalable AI solutions. Some early products already available on the marketplace include: a Proof of Address verifier, SA Bank confirmation letter data extractor, Dyula to French translator and a whole lot more coming soon. We love to see African AI solutions rising.

🐶 Mind-Reading AI. Scientists at the University of the West of England Bristol and Scotland’s Rural College, as well as ones at the University of Haifa, are getting closer to helping us interpret animals’ emotions thanks to AI. The Intellipig system examines photos of pigs’ faces for signs of pain, sickness, or emotional distress, while another project is helping identify signs of discomfort in dogs. Call us when they can accurately predict when your cat is ‘bout to knock something off a shelf…

⚡️Powering Your Pharmacy Parcel. Clicks has launched 42 electric delivery vans replete with solar-powered refrigeration (cause some meds mos gotta stay cold) under its United Pharmaceutical Distributors (UPD) arm in partnership with local startup Everlectric. The pilot will see vans rolled out in Gauteng and the Western Cape, with Gqeberha and Durban next on the list. But can we use our Clicks ClubCard points to get free delivery?

🙅‍♂️ More Political Blocking? South Korea has become the latest country to block Chinese AI company DeepSeek from being downloaded while it evaluates how the company handles user data. Existing app and web services will remain unaffected but the country’s data protection authority “strongly advises” users to not enter private info into DeepSeek until a final decision has been made. Ja, you shouldn't be adding personal data anywhere where the machines can know how to get ya…

🦄 Take Your Shot. Wanna take your startup onto the international stage? The Isle of Man is inviting SA startups to apply for its 3rd annual Innovation Challenge. Successful applicants get access to world-class mentors and potential investors within their ecosystem. The winners unlock everything you need to take this thing global — apply here.

BUILDING TOGETHER

Happening over at The Open Collab

In the last few days alone, in our online community, we…

• Got our pick of killer AI jobs before everyone in the country 😎.
• Got years and years of LinkedIn Ads experience in less than an hour.
• Mused about what Apple fans might be getting at the launch on Wednesday.
• Got some free coffee and had a lekker in-person meet-up in Cape Town.
• Got a mass of awesome new AI toys to play with 🕹️.
• Helped Erhard find some great Tech Lead potentials for a new play.
• Got SA’s No 1 product guy to give Khalid quality feedback on their beta-stage product.
• Helped Sabeeha with some options for an e-commerce developer.
• Welcome a lot of new members — what a vibe 🎧💃🕺🎶.

Thinking about joining The Open Collab?

• Supercharge your network in the SA startup landscape — get that introduction, get that customer, or meet that partner.
• Get feedback on your products, services and/or offers from others who have built and are building their own products right now.
• Join all our online and in-person events for free!
• Exclusive 1-on-1 sessions with startup consultants.

SA’s only dedicated tech startup and scale-up founder community.

Join The Open Collab

HAPPENING SOON

Upcoming Events

Financial year-end stress? It doesn’t need to be so painful. Join our Friday LinkedIn Live webinar with Outsourced CFO’s Damien Baker, unpacking how to take the 😰 out of your FYE — register here for free.

Happening Friday 21 Feb at 12:00

6 March 2025 — First Open Letter In-Person Event of 2025: Come meet us and the entire community at Launchlab in Stellenbosch for another legendary Open Letter event — R100 per person or free to members of The Open Collab community.

14 March 2025 — Exclusive Offshoring Case Study: Get all the lessons without any of the pain as you hear first-hand how and how NOT to do offshoring (and what you need to know before you start) — exclusive to members of The Open Collab community.

View all our upcoming events here.

WHAT YOU SAID

Flying high…

On Friday we riddled you about an SA startup that uses machine learning to analyse aerial imagery for Agri insights, and most of you recognised Aerobotics…

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🌾 AgriBot (31%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🌱 Aerobotics (45%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🚜 FarmVision (14%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🌍 CropGuard (10%)

Your 2 cents…

Nice one, Cornelus! Sounds like you know them well 🌽.

Ooh, so close — but now can you go check out Aerobotics 🪴.

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Robots we’ll love? While everyone’s racing to build humanoid AI robot assistants, Apple’s announced that’s creepy and they’re opting for robots that elicit positive emotions instead — now the internet wants their Pixar-style dancing lamp, or something cuter.

And so, this Valentine’s we dance into another Fast-Five Friday — 5 SA startups you should know, let’s go…

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1. HERE COMES THE PAIN

Power to the People

Aside from that little weekend blip at the end of January (literally, the day after NERSA gave Eskom less than it wanted), SA’s been riding the loadshedding-free wave for almost a year now, causing only a slight dip in solar demand as it’s still a good alternative to expensive Eskom power.

Since the start of SA’s electricity crisis in 2007/2008, Eskom’s tariffs have increased by 937%, 6x more than inflation (just 155%). From 1 April, there will be 12.7% more pain, followed by 5.36% and 6.19% each financial year thereafter.

While load shedding might never come back, prices will keep rising. This means your electricity savings using a solar installation could start to justify a solar-as-a-service solution and actually save you money.

And that’s exactly what local Solar-as-a-Service provider Versofy is banking on — that renting solar from them could save you money.

It’s enough to bring tears to your eyes…

2. LOCKED IN

South Africans are a Loyal Bunch

Over 75% of South Africans are part of some or other loyalty programme, with many belonging to nearly 10 different programmes. That’s a heck of a lot of cards…

And while the larger retailers have cards, databases, and all sorts of personalised fancy offers to reward their customers, smaller stores and cafes rely on the good ol’ stamp card.

We recently saw local loyalty platform BrewPrks at play in a coffee shop in Stellenbosch, and they’ve taken the stamp card game up a notch. Not only do you accumulate your “stamps” as per usual – getting your 10th cuppa free – they’ve also gamified it: Build a streak by visiting your fave spot more frequently and you can get more rewards sooner.

Merchants on the other hand can see how their loyal customers are spending, cater deals for their VIPs, integrate the system (without overhauling their POS), and get Google reviews.

We think their maps function could help with the discoverability of new (or existing) cafes as users look for nearby places with BrewPrks. 

3. HELP IS ON THE WAY

Safety at the Tap of a Button

Emergencies are never a lekker experience. Car accidents, medical emergencies, veld fires, criminal activity or rip currents – those first few moments are crucial. But most of us probably don't even know what to do in a real emergency…

That’s where something like the Namola emergency response app can be super helpful: It’s like having a mobile panic button that lets you select the type of emergency and it instantly connects you with an agent that can connect you to the closest relevant first responder.

They even have a “Sensitive Incident” option for a silent SOS chat with an agent during home invasions, crimes in progress, or domestic, and gender-based violence.

Then Namola also lets you track your family when they’re travelling, with smart alerts for departure and arrivals, as well as a community feature for keeping up to date with emergencies in your area.

We downloaded the app to play around with the features and tapped “Other”, just to see what it was for – less than 15 seconds later, a friendly chap from Namola was on the line to check if we were OK. Oops, but darn good service.

Want to build with other folks developing lekker stuff in SA’s startup ecosystem? Namola CEO Pete Adolphs, is part of The Open Collab, our community of South African startup founders and builders. And you can come build with them and almost 100 top SA founders, right now – join here.

4. MAKING THE SWITCH

SA’s Electricity Marketplace

The unbundling of Eskom into generation, transmission and delivery was a step toward an open energy market, which creates exciting opportunities for private businesses to get involved — effectively using Eskom’s transmission lines to allow a solar farm in the Karoo to power an industrial plant in an urban area.

But how does one determine how much of this power, which runs on the same lines as Eskom’s generated power, was created by this solar farm and then used by the industrial plant in question?

That’s where local EnerTech startup Switch Energy comes into play. Their combination of smart metering and energy trading software allows the management of contracts between transmission, generation and consumption.

With the South African electricity shakeup unfolding, we can't help but wonder if startups like Switch are poised for a bigger impact in people’s pockets… 

PS: The tech behind Switch was built by our friends over at Octoco. If you have a hardcore tech project that needs some expert support, go check them out.

5. PARTNER FEATURE

Your Investment Rate is Your Personal Growth Rate

You know the startup rule: growth compounds.

The same applies to your personal wealth, so are you hitting your KPIs? The magic number is 20% — that’s the ideal percentage of your income to invest each month. 

But most founders aren’t even close.

That’s fine. Just like scaling a startup, the key is starting small and increasing every year.

Fynbos Money makes it effortless

✅ Measure: Divide your net income by the investment amount to get your current rate.

✅ Automate: Invest what you can through a monthly debit order.

✅ Iterate: Continuously improve, just like your startup, increasing your rate consistently.

Instagram post by @fynbosmoney

Founders don’t wait for perfect conditions. They take small, smart steps today that lead to big outcomes later.

Start growing your wealth with Fynbos

IN SHORT

Some convo grease for tonight’s Valentine’s Day date…

📱Corporate MVNOs. Cashing in on the rise in popularity of mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) in SA, JSE-listed investment firm Huge Group has launched Huge NXTGN, a platform to help businesses looking to embed virtual digital or connectivity services into their offering to their end-customers. Ooooohhh, it’s about to get tasty on mobile…

📺 Apple TV Goes Android. Streaming service Apple TV has just found a new home on Android smartphones, tablets, and foldables. And for R125 per month, subscribers can sign up directly from their Android phones. Other than Severance, anyone watching something cool on Apple TV?

🦻Hear us Out. The hearing aid feature on Apple’s AirPods Pro 2 is “available” in South Africa. According to Apple the AirPods Pro 2 provides “a clinical-grade Hearing Aid feature for perceived mild to moderate hearing loss”. And while it’s not been listed on Apple’s website (might still be subject to approval from SA’s Health Products Regulatory Authority), a local Apple user has stumbled across the capability. Guess Apple is really pushing into that whole keeping the Dr away thing…

💰JSE PSA. Have you ever been employed, been a shareholder, or had a loved one pass away? Well, you could qualify for your share of R4.5 billion in unclaimed JSE dividends. The Claim It campaign is trying to reunite nearly 375’000 former employees, shareholders, and beneficiaries of deceased estates with their long-lost funds. Head to the Claim It website to find out. Jis, we could be sitting pretty and not even know about it.

🚀 Your Startup on the Global Stage. If you think you have what it takes, the Isle of Man is hosting its 3rd annual Innovation Challenge and inviting SA startups to apply for access to their world-class mentors, potential investors and more. Successful applicants will be invited into their ecosystem to build real solutions in FinTech, CleanTech, Data & AI in the world’s only UNESCO-designated Biosphere. The winners unlock everything you need to propel your startup onto the global stage — apply here.

🏆 SA’s Top Startup? Innovation City Cape Town is on the hunt for SA’s top startup with some great prizes up for grabs. Head on over to their LinkedIn announcement for more details.

🎯 The Stack. Founders need trustworthy tools and suppliers. Our Founder’s Stack includes an easy-to-apply R5M business facility from Lula, next-level authority building with Stream, and loads more vital startup tools and services.

CHECK THIS OUT

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JOBS IN TECH

Fall in Love with Your New Job.

🧱 Senior Product Manager - Merchant Experience @ BVNK

📊 Analytics Engineer @ Takealot

😉 Delivery Lead: Client Experience @ Capitec

👗 Stylist @ Superbalist

Hiring? Get in touch, and we will feature it here.

GAME TIME

Know the startup?

This SA startup uses machine learning to analyse aerial imagery to provide farmers with detailed insights into the health of individual trees improving crop management and yields.

WHAT YOU SAID

Have a break…

On Tuesday, we asked About your preferred eco-stay, and we have our first-ever tie with a 50/50 for the beach and the mountain (so Cape Town, then?)…

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🚣‍♀️ River/dam (12%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⛰️ Mountain/forest (35%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🌊 Ocean/beach (35%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🐑 Farm (2%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🦁 Safari (13%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🏡 My house (3%)

Your 2 cents…

Ooh, stop it, Gail — else we gonna want to come visit 🌻.

For sure, Diane! Better keep an eye on SA’s relations with Elon Musk, though — probably gonna need Starlink up there 🏞️.

Indeed William! Seafront mountain cabins for everyone — wonder which founders are solving that supply-demand problem ⛰︎.

He he, we can only imagine you typed that and then jumped into a Land Rover and… Wolvaardt, Wolvaardt, you there…? 🦁

Indeed, Richard. Sommer take a boat there, too 🌊.

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Game on? We’re another step closer to having full-on energy weapons like in Destiny and Halo — scientists have learnt how to steer sparks and energy streams through the air using ultrasound pulses. Soon. Real soon. ⚡︎

In this Open Letter:

• Riches in the niches: Releasing R27bn back into the wild.
• Super Bowl startups, SA’s most reviewed & our speed test results.
• Cloud accounting: How to get your financial year-end sorted, no stress.
• Who knew that Spoon Money thang? The results are in.
• Short on ideas? Share this and get 100+ SA startup ideas.

Together with:

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TRENDING NOW

Sending R27bn Back into the Wild

The usual old swarm of travel apps aren’t that good at finding those truly niche experiences you’re really looking for – a shame, ‘cos SA’s eco-tourism’s got some gems no one’s discovering.

In this Tuesday's Deep Dive, we unpack a startup that’s changing up this space with a lekker eco-friendly hyper-local solution…

Tourism is a major driver of our economy—and beyond that, it directly supports conservation efforts in the destinations travellers explore.

Back in 2019 (just before Covid), eco-tourism (or biodiversity-based tourism) chipped in a respectable R27.7 billion to SA’s GDP, with R13 out of every R100 tourism spend going toward eco-tourism.

And South Africans love themselves a bit of local nature, with a whopping 70.4% of total biodiversity-based tourism expenditure coming from domestic visitors…

Good for the Economy, Great for the Environment…

But one thing Covid highlighted was eco-tourism’s reliance on tourists – cancelled flights and accommodation plans in late 2021 resulted in more than R200 million per day in lost revenue in Cape Town alone.

This revenue drop slashed conservation budgets, leading to increased poaching, wildlife trafficking, deforestation and all kinds of negative environmental consequences as people tried to make a living.

Fast-forward to 2025 and, while there haven't been any travel restrictions and growth looks promising (a 5.1% increase in arrivals from 2023 to 2024), we have yet to reach pre-pandemic levels – 10.2 million tourists in 2019.

The rise in flight ticket costs in the last few years hasn't made it easy on local travellers’ pockets, either, with flights from Jozi to Cape Town and Durban jumping 43.4% and 31.7% respectively between 2022 and 2024. Goodness, gracious…

‍

Go Local in Nature…

Few of the mainstream booking platforms offer nature-specific getaways. 

Understandable, since when these platforms launch (or even an e-commerce platform like Takealot), the limited supply makes discoverability easy. But as they try to expand to cater for the growing market and supply increases, it becomes harder to serve niche interests.

Of course, in the world of startup, that just means there’s a gap for someone to come shake things up – and maybe have a positive effect on the surrounding environment while they’re at it…

The Local Booking Platform Adding More Cash for Conservation...

Conservio is a local accommodation booking platform specifically aimed at nature lovers to discover and book getaways in nature. 

With just under 500 listings across South Africa and around 70 in Namibia and Mozambique, Conservio is quite careful about the places they select for their platform, picking those with a shared commitment to conservation, community development, and ethical business practices. 

This makes for great UX—you’re not overwhelmed with choices, just truly spectacular nature getaways. It also helps you get really specific with different search criteria (like the 16 places in SA with a pizza oven) and accurate information about what you can actually do there: bird-watching, hiking, nature photography, etc.

We recently caught up with Conservio Co-Founders Lara and Justin to hear that most of the accommodations listed with them are small businesses run by the owners (and their families). So they’re simultaneously supporting conservation efforts and the SMEs that employ and buy locally. Nice, 

Enhancing discoverability and customer service for niche interests in a market that has expanded sufficiently to support a niche subset is a common local strategy (as seen with Wanatu creating an Afrikaans driver “Uber” clone). There are bound to be numerous opportunities for local players to develop platforms that address niche demands.

We are watching this space…

CHECK THIS OUT

Feeling the Year-End Squeeze? Let Cloud Accounting Experts Lighten the Load

It’s that time of year — tax deadlines are looming, reports are piling up, and your finance team is running on coffee and sheer willpower. Sound familiar?

The fiscal year-end isn’t just stressful — it’s a recipe for burnout. A Deloitte study found that 73% of finance professionals feel overwhelmed during peak periods. Accuracy drops, inefficiencies rise, and manual processes make everything harder than it needs to be.

“At this time of year, it’s not just about surviving the crunch,” says Damian Baker, Head of Cloud Accounting at Outsourced CFO. “It’s about simplifying processes, automating where you can, and giving your team the tools they need to thrive.”

Ready to Thrive?

Cloud accounting is the game-changer your team needs. With real-time data, automated reports, and seamless integrations, you can replace chaos with clarity and free up your team to focus on what matters most.

Why let spreadsheets rule your year-end? Make 2025 the year you ditch the stress — and embrace efficiency.

Learn How

On Friday 21 February at 12 PM, we’re hosting a LinkedIn Live session where Damian’s gonna show you practical, easy-to-implement financial strategies to stay in control, avoid last-minute surprises at year-end, and set up your business for growth in 2025.

Plus: How CFO tools can help take your business to the next level.

Register for Free on LinkedIn

IN SHORT

Strike up a conversation…

🏆 Ladies in Tech. Only a few days left to submit your nomination for the 2nd edition of the Wired4Women Awards to honour the outstanding achievements of women in the South African IT industry. Nominations close on 14 Feb 2024. Categories include CIO of the Year, Rising Star in Emerging Tech, Top Tech Innovator and more, with the winner of the Tech4Good Award walking away with a cash prize of R30 000 towards her initiative. We love to see it…

🗺️ Putting SA on the Map. Google Maps turned 20 and revealed SA’s most reviewed places including most reviewed restaurant and cafe: RoccoMamas Mall of Africa, Jozi, and Truth Coffee Roasting, Cape Town, respectively. Gandhi Square Precinct is the most reviewed visitor attraction, while Maropeng – Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site — is the most reviewed museum. Table Mountain National Park is the most reviewed park in SA. *Saves spots on Google Maps.

🤑 Super AdSpend. ICYMI: this year’s Super Bowl ads included 5 startups that coughed up the millions required for a coveted Super Bowl ad slot. One is spend-management platform Ramp (replete with its investor Philadelphia Eagles running back, Saquon Barkley). OpenAI also ran its first-ever TV Ad, telehealth company Hims and Hers, Prebiotic soda brand Poppi, and Papaya Global, a workforce payment platform. Oh ja — the Philadelphia Eagles beat defending Champs Kansas City Chiefs 40-22.

🚄 Clash of the (Mobile) Titans. In a bid to quench SA’s internet users’ need for speed, MTN is leading the pack as the fastest mobile provider hitting 77.13 Mbps median download speed, followed by Vodacom at 55.95 Mbps, and Cell C with 44.07 Mbps (Gaining ground, but still well below the global average of 113.25 Mbps). Vodacom’s median 5G download speed however beat MTN’s with 227.92 Mbps against MTN’s 172.51 Mbps. Not bad.

🚀 Your Startup on the Global Stage. If you think you have what it takes, the Isle of Man is hosting its 3rd annual Innovation Challenge and inviting SA startups to apply for access to their world-class mentors, potential investors and more. Successful applicants will be invited into their ecosystem to build real solutions in FinTech, CleanTech, Data & AI in the world’s only UNESCO-designated Biosphere. The winners unlock everything you need to propel your startup onto the global stage — apply here.

BUILDING TOGETHER

Happening over at The Open Collab

In the last few days alone, in our online community, we…

• Helped Gustav with some great options for international payment providers 💸.
• All learned how to avoid the most insidious “founder trap” — Thanks, Cam!
• Helped Carlos track down some payment gateway options for Zim.
• Discovered a wave of the most insanely innovative new FinTechs coming out of SA.
• Got a super-sweet list of unbelievably good AI Agents that’ll build your app in seconds 🔥😎.
• Helped Richard with some killer South African WhatsApp Business service providers.
• Helped Christian get some powerful subscription and payment collection tools for a friend in agri-HR.
• Connected Sona with some serious builder-founders for a potential new startup. 🚀

Thinking about joining The Open Collab?

• Supercharge your network in the SA startup landscape — get that introduction, get that customer, or meet that partner.
• Get feedback on your products, services and/or offers from others who have built and are building their own products right now.
• Join all our online and in-person events for free!
• Exclusive 1-on-1 sessions with startup consultants.

SA’s only dedicated tech startup and scale-up founder community.

Join The Open Collab

HAPPENING SOON

Upcoming Events

13 February 2025 — Cape Town Coffee Meetup: Come hang out with the Open Collab community, meet new faces, and chat about what you’re working on — exclusive to members of The Open Collab community.

14 February 2025 — LinkedIn Ad Hacks: Cracking the code: How you can make LinkedIn ads work for you on any budget — exclusive to members of The Open Collab community.

View all our upcoming events here.

WHAT YOU SAID

Guessing games…

Last Friday we asked if you could spot the real SA startup, and you guys were right on the (cutlery) money…

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🥘 ChowBuddy: A smart fridge system that lets restaurants donate excess food to charities. (24%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🌿 GreenFleet: A rideshare company where all vehicles are electric. (16%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📦 StackBox: A self-storage startup that delivers your storage box to your door. (20%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🥄 Spoon Money: A fintech platform providing group savings and micro-loans to informal women entrepreneurs. (40%)

Your 2 cents…

Oh no, Danei, now you’re disqualified for our super-secret extra-special mystery prize… 🧐

Nice one, Sharon — and lucky it was 🍀.

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So the truth is REALLY out there? The FBI accidentally in this article made 2 shocking revelations to the world: 1) They totally have a secret UFO and paranormal investigation unit (The X-Files?) and 2) They're pretty worried its agents (Mulder and Scully, we presume?) could be purged by Trump and Elon’s DOGE. 👽

And then it hits you — smack! — another Fast-Five Friday: 5 things in startups every South African should know. Let’s go…

Together with:

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1. FIND THAT GIG

Scaling Startups, One Task at a Time

Ever since Covid (and everything it brought to the world of work) there’s been a rise in fractional employment (hiring employees on a part-time or per-project basis, rather than full-time)...

In fact, there’s been a 57% increase in fractional jobs since 2020. And it benefits both employees and employers, offering flexibility in working schedule, and diverse projects contract workers can work on at the same time. 

Organisations, of course, can save on salary and benefits costs while leveraging experienced workers’ skill sets for a shorter time (and lower cost).

No wonder we’ve seen this fractional trend in a number of local startups we’ve chatted with recently.

Rafiki is a platform aimed specifically at freelancers and fractional workers in Africa, that aims to connect these workers to opportunities in international organisations.

Covering a host of digital specialisations including UI, UX, graphic and product design, as well as digital marketing & strategy, and frontend and low-code dev, Rafiki helps connect freelancers, founders, agencies and SMBs with fractional talent, and relevant fractional opportunities.

2. DUUUH DUN... DUUUH DUN...

7x Less Deadly than Eating a Hotdog…

Humans are way scarier than sharks and rays — whose numbers have decreased by 71.1% in the last 50 years… Despite their evolutionary ancestors existing 200 million years before the dinosaurs, and them surviving 5 mass extinction events, there seems to be one thing they might not survive: mankind.

Overfishing, bycatching, habitat degradation, and climate change all contribute to the decline in shark numbers. But there’s also the negative connotation with sharks thanks to flicks like “Jaws”, and as a result, coastal tourism hotspots around the world have for decades tried to implement measures (like shark nets) to keep beachgoers safe.

Not to knock shark nets, but they are deadly to sharks and other marine life who get stuck in them and die horrible little deaths just so that we can sun lounge and barely go in the water anyway. We really need a smarter solution…

The SharkSafe Barrier is a South African eco-friendly product born from a genius observation: sharks never swim through kelp forests when hunting cape fur seals.

The barrier is made up of a bunch of vertical tubes (made from recycled HDPE) that biomimics – you guessed it – a kelp forest. And then it takes it one step further: The “forest” itself features ceramic magnets that create a magnetic field – ‘cos sharks are super sensitive to that stuff and never go near it. Noice!

3. CONNECTING THE DOTS

Protecting SA’s Unbanked Rands

Many, and we mean MANY, people in South Africa are still hustling with cash…

Some reports say that 9 out of 10 transactions in SA are still being made in cash, with customers buying from informal small businesses, and even formal businesses opting to pay in cash 95% and 63% of the time respectively.  

But this creates a disconnect between cash and digital/tech-enabled payment users. In fact, whether you pay a painter or pool guy with cash from the ATM, or send them an e-wallet, they end up walking around with cash either way – risky business in SA. 

6DOT50 is a local FinTech platform that’s bridging the gap by letting anyone without a bank account store value in a free, voucher-based, transactional wallet. The Digital Rand Voucher and ZAR are 1:1, and they never expire. Plus the person can use it to transact at any of the merchants in 6DOT50’s network of 90k+ stores and online retailers.

You as the payer, simply buy Digital Rand vouchers and add them to your 6DOT50 Wallet by bank card, EFT, paying with cash or crypto at a retailer, which is then sent to your voucher wallet. You then send the Digital Rands to someone using their phone number, use a merchant code for merchants, or use your Digital Rands to buy groceries, airtime, data, Takealot vouchers, or even purchase a car…

6DOT50 is also doing some interesting things in the Digital Cash space with their kasiCash, CryptoPMTS, and 6DOT50 Pay applications. We’re watching this space…

Want to connect, learn from or build with Chris from 6DOT50 and other cool founder peeps? Come join our Open Collab community.

4. BUILDER FASTER THAN EVER

A FullStack Engineer in your Browser…

Two Christmases ago, festive table chats about this “cool ChatGPT thing” thrust AI into the mainstream. 

And it’s grown so fast that 2025 is being dubbed the “Year of the AI Agent” as companies like Salesforce, Microsoft and (according to Forrester Research) 400+ other vendors are already building AI Agents – or offering to do so for their customer base.

We recently stumbled across two US startups using AI Agents to build bespoke apps in minutes…

Loveable (aka gptengineer) is an AI Agent that can help you build a software product without writing a single line of code. Now you could do something pretty simple like build a landing page or something a little more complex that allows user inputs like dates and times etc. 

We played around with it a little and it’s really easy to input prompts and have it spin out a pretty decent v1 which you can then iterate on.

The other is Replit, which also helps you build software products with no coding knowledge. What was really interesting was once it had built and deployed the project, it asked us to confirm if certain functions were, in fact, working – a really clever way to help prompt the user to prompt the AI.

5. WHAT WE’RE READING

A Front Row Seat at a High Growth Startup

There is nothing quite as exhilarating as building a high-growth tech startup, and when a founder shares their learnings of that journey, it’s worth gold.

And that’s exactly what Tyler Denk, Founder of beehiiv is doing with his newsletter Big Desk Energy.

Tyler was the tech guy behind The Morning Brew, a popular US-based business newsletter, then spent some time at YouTube before founding beehiiv.

‍

From raising a $33 million Series B round to hiring his first salesperson and hitting ±$20m in annual recurring revenue in only its 4th year, Tyler shares it all in his weekly newsletter.

If you are a founder or someone interested in the journey of a founder of a high-growth tech startup, sign up for Tyler’s Dig Desk Enegery here.

IN SHORT

What’s the happs?

🤝 FinTechs Assemble. Local FinTechs Float and Peach Payments are teaming up to bring Float’s buy now pay later (BNPL) offering to thousands of Peach Payments merchants. This will enable merchants to offer more consumers around the country access to interest-free monthly instalments. In this cash-strapped economy, we’re sure it’ll be quite helpful.

🛰️ 3.2.1. Disengage. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has formally withdrawn Starlink from participation in SA’s communications regulator Icasa’s public satellite hearings into the proposed new licensing framework for satellite services in South Africa. On Wednesday night SpaceX notified Icasa it would no longer participate in the hearings. Curiouser and curiouser…

🔋Megabattery. Local energy company Megamillion is set for a JV with China’s Dr Henry Mao to launch the Giga-Africa 1 battery plant. The partnership will see Dr Mao transfer technology, equipment, and skilled personnel to operations in SA over the next few years. Very nice.

🇿🇦 Digital Growth. South Africa has jumped 6 places to 66th in the world in Surfshark’s Digital Quality of Life Index (DQL) 2024. The annual study measures a country’s digital wellbeing based on five core pillars: internet quality, internet affordability, e-security, e-infrastructure, and e-government and is conducted in 121 countries. So, average then?

😎 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with super-smart business banking from Lula, your own CFO for a fraction of the cost with OCFO and 12 more vital startup tools & services.

CHECK THIS OUT

The Founder’s Trap: Are You Holding Your Own Business Back?

Scaling should bring freedom — not burnout…

Many founders reach a breaking point where they feel like they’re the only ones who truly understand the business, the customers, and the decisions that matter. The result? An unscalable, high-pressure role where every problem lands on your plate.

Metavolve helps founders escape this trap by shifting from being the central problem-solver to building a team that can think, decide, and execute with confidence. 

Because scaling isn’t just about more revenue — it’s about freeing yourself from the daily grind without sacrificing quality.

Join Cameron Coutts from Metavolve for an exclusive masterclass on breaking free from the Founder’s Trap — so your business can scale without you being the bottleneck.

🗓 Friday 7 February (Today), 12-1 PM, Google Meet (online)
🔍 The scale-up trap we all think is normal — and how to escape it

Join Here

What you’ll learn:
💡 Why founders feel like the only ones who truly understand their business (why this is a trap!)
💡 How decision bottlenecks create chaos, not growth
💡 The strategies to build a team that thinks, decides, and executes without you
💡 How to stop being the "Chief Problem Solver" so you can scale sustainably

PS. Can’t make it today? Reach out to Metavolve and book a personalised session.

Explore how to break free

JOBS IN TECH

Full-time, not Fractional?

📊 Senior Product Manager @ Luno

🤖 Data Engineer @ iKhokha

🎨 UI Designer (with UX experience) @ Free Grape Society

💼 Account Director @ Engage Video Group

🧭 Director of Operations: Energy @ Zutari

Hiring? Get in touch, and we will feature it here.

GAME TIME

3 Startup Lies and a Truth

WHAT YOU SAID

Electric play things…

On Tuesday we asked about your favourite STEM-related school project, and you guys are such a hoot…

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🐣 Egg-drop container (0)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ ☀️ Solar cooker (11%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⚡️ Electric circuit board (45%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🚰 Water-filtration system (15%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤳 App/website (11%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Nah, I had an even better one... (18%)

Your 2 cents…

Ai, Danei, ja sometimes we wish we had cool stuff (like Finmaster) at school 🎲.

Ooo, Lethabo, then you’ll love having a chat with our resident LEGO legend, Jason 👷.

Ha ha, William, you’re not suggesting that all projects are… LOL ❤️‍🔥.

Spice rack, Enrico? Ours is still standing in Mom’s kitchen after all these years. He he 🪚

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