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.

‍

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 🎣.

Powered by beehiiv

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:

‍

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.

‍

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:

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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…

‍

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

Hire an AI BDR and Save on Headcount

Outbound requires hours of manual work.

Hire Ava who automates your entire outbound demand generation process, including:

• Intent-Driven Lead Discovery
• High Quality Emails with Waterfall Personalization
• Follow-Up Management

Let your reps focus on closing deals instead of writing emails.

Hire Ava to slash costs & boost productivity.

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…

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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 🪚

Powered by beehiiv

Bit of a jolt? It’s official, scientists have found the sizzling secret to building muscle and getting ripped: You have to give yourself electric shocks while training. So, who’s starting SA’s first electro gym?

In this Open Letter:

• Last-mile magic: Helping double SA e-commerce customers.
• PnP’s data leak, Trump saves TikTok & nomading to CT.
• Building smart: The right time to involve a lawyer in your plans.
• An SA startup clean sweep: The poll results are in.
• Short on ideas? Share this and get 100+ SA startup ideas.

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TRENDING NOW

Helping SA E-Commerce Double Their Customers

In today’s Tuesday Deep Dive, we examine the impact of inefficient deliveries on e-commerce margins and an innovative startup using algorithms to optimise routes and make deliveries cheaper than ever. Let’s go…

It felt like it took forever and then it happened. Covid was the catalyst that finally made SA e-commerce accelerate towards its potential.

It started with optimised home food and grocery deliveries, followed by other products. These products greased the country’s e-commerce wheels, making people much more comfortable shopping (and, most importantly, paying) online during lockdown.

In 2023, SA’s online shopping sector hit R71 billion (a 29% increase from the year before), and it’s expected to reach the R100 billion mark as soon as this year.

And consumers and retailers alike love the convenience of home deliveries (not to mention the sales it brings retailers). In the 2nd half of 2023, Shoprite Checkers’ Sixty60’s sales grew by 63%, Pick n Pay’s online sales grew by 76%, and Woolies grew by 47% in online sales.

Not to mention the sheer number of delivery drivers on bikes and other delivery vehicles zipping around the highways and byways of SA. Some say there are over 50k lightweight delivery bikes alone, with this number predicted to double by 2027. 

What makes up a delivery?

With SA’s average e-commerce spend around R430, and an average delivery fee between R50 and R80 per order, roughly 15% of a transaction goes to delivery costs. 

And with the retailers offering free delivery when you spend over a certain amount (for those that do it’s around R500), this % drops ever so slightly.

Interestingly, about half of SA’s online shoppers would prefer the cost of delivery for their items to be part of the cost of goods – so retailers are having to pick their battles carefully. 

So, how do you maximise what you can get out of that delivery fee?

Well, a delivery has various parts that make up its cost but by far the most expensive is the salary of the driver (hence the major investment in self-driving vehicles and drone deliveries globally – but that’s a story for another day).

If a single driver can deliver 11 parcels a day as opposed to 10, that’s almost a 10% saving in delivery cost per delivery. Crazy.

But just how can one deliver more with the same people, same equipment, same traffic? 

Using intelligence, live traffic data, historical patterns and a rules-based engine, driver delivery routes can be optimised to ensure maximum deliveries per day, while still maintaining the quality and service standards of the retailer and courier company to maximise your delivery efficiency, and minimise your cost.

Powering some of SA’s biggest last-mile deliveries… 

Loop is a local delivery management platform powering the delivery capabilities of some of SA’s biggest delivery players: OneCart, The Courier Guy, Pingo (the team handling Checkers Sixty60), Nandos, and more.

The cloud-based delivery platform manages your deliveries (sans driver) from business to driver, to customer; all in – as the name suggests – a loop, providing route optimisation, and real-time driver tracking and performance metrics, so that both the business and their end customer know where the goods are at (125 metres at a time).

Loop makes trips more cost-effective, shorter, and efficient using intelligence. And shorter trips mean less money spent on delivery, etc.

We chatted to Loop’s founder, Kimberley Taylor, who explained she’d been writing an algorithm to solve “The Travelling Salesman Problem” (a math problem of finding the shortest route between several points without crossing the same point twice) in 2016 when she noticed a whole host of inefficiencies in the space and developed the Loop ecosystem to work on 3 key components:

• The business has a web-based platform giving it visibility on orders, drivers, and the various statuses of the delivery. All of Loop’s intelligence magic like route optimisation and planning sits on this side.

• Drivers access either an Android or iOS app to receive their orders/deliveries, get delivery details, submit delivery proof, use a sign-on glass feature, etc.

• Lastly, the end customer has a web-based tracking page to see where their order is and when it’s set to arrive. With Loop’s API, they’re able to make it so that tracking info can be embedded directly into the business application for a seamless customer experience.

The impact? Loop tries hard to make itself accessible to smaller companies (16 deliveries/tasks per day) as well as the big guys. It helps most businesses increase their average delivery volume by 30%, reduce travel distances by 20%, and serve twice as many customers every month. Nice.

With the big e-commerce players doubling down on the local market, more retailers wanting a piece of the pie, and solutions like Loop driving intelligent innovation in deliveries, we’re watching this space…

CHECK THIS OUT

The Right Time to Involve a Lawyer

A Harvard Business School study found that startups that seek legal advice are 4 times more likely to succeed than those that don’t. 

And, if you are raising funding (now or down the line), a National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) survey says 90% of VCs take a startup’s legal preparedness very seriously when considering investment.

The reality is most founders and business owners avoid involving lawyers because they assume it’ll be too expensive. But not all legal services should cost you the farm.

Dommisse Attorneys have been helping South African startups with:

• MoI’s and shareholder agreements – helping to navigate co-founder and shareholder relationships.
• Offshoring IP and setting up abroad to make it attractive for foreign investors.
• Sale of shares and fundraising – get a great team on your side to help you avoid blind spots and protect your interests.

Need legal advice for your startup? 

Get in touch with Dommisse Attorneys today to explore how they can set up your startup for success.

Speak to Dommisse Today

IN SHORT

Strike up a conversation…

🐺 Funding the Wolf. Local crowdsourcing security platform CommunityWolf raised $100k from Baobab Network. ICYMI, we recently covered them in a Fast Five Friday segment here.

👩‍💻 Mother City Nomads. Cape Town is gearing up to host digital nomads and industry leaders from around the world at the first Nomad Week from the 9th to the 15th of March as it looks to position itself as the leading remote working destination. What a great way to introduce more lekker people into the startup ecosystem.

🕺The 11th Hour. TikTok’s services in the US have been restored after a (very) brief ban on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration. It seems like The Don may be responsible for getting the short video-sharing app back up and running, saying that it’s important to save TikTok as it saves jobs and businesses. But will Trump’s Gen Z haters change their mind on him now he’s restored their precious TikTok?

✂️ Swooping In. On Sunday, as CapCut (ByteDance’s video editing app) was getting booted off the App & Play Stores, Meta announced its very own video editing app, Edits, set to launch in Feb on iOS and later on Android. Gotta wonder if it’ll head the same way as Threads if the CapCut ban gets resolved by Trump…

🥸 Leak n Pay. Claim Expert, a company local retailer Pick n Pay used to renew vehicle license discs for its customers between 2022 and 2023 has apparently had over 56’000 PnP’s clients’ data leaked on the dark web after a “potential information security incident” that happened on 18 July 2024. Data includes names, surnames, ID numbers, cellphone numbers and email addresses. Eina.

🎯 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.

BUILDING TOGETHER

Happening over at The Open Collab

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

• Had another incredible Sales session with Sebastian 🤯.
• Celebrated a successful funding round with Priaash, Estelle and Shaziah!
• Helped Jo spread the word that they’re hiring.
• Discussed the efficacy of network-building on LinkedIn VS in-person, or a bit of both…
• Gawked at Gustav’s text-to-speech & AI voice generator.
• Helped Andy source a host of awesome notetaker options.
• Welcomed so many new members, it’s starting to hum in here… 💃🏻🕺🏽

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

24 January 2025 — Chat Roullete: Get to know some of the coolest founders in SA at the collab’s exclusive members-only jam session — exclusive to members of The Open Collab community.

31 January 2025 — Fundraising 101 — AMA: We’ve invited founders and teams who’ve recently raised funding to give you the ins and outs of securing investment —exclusive to members of The Open Collab community.

View all our upcoming events here.

WHAT YOU SAID

A clean game…

We gave you a riddle last Friday and asked if you recognised the startup — and, yeah, most of us know Sweepsouth…

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ OfferZen (25%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Sorbet (17%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Sweepsouth (58%)

Your 2 cents…

Lekker to have you here, Cheryl! 🎉

He he, ours too… ❤️

Nice one! Upward and onward 🚀

Powered by beehiiv

Enough social? With the US still threatening to ban TikTok unless they sell to an American concern, a new potential buyer has emerged: Mr Beast says he wants to try buy the platform. His Insta fans seem a little torn by the idea — check the comments on his post.

And just like that, it’s another Fast-Five Friday — 5 things in SA startup worth knowing about… let’s dive in!

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1. HAPPY DAYS

Big Benefits from Small Business

Any small-to-medium business owner’s heart sinks when that rockstar potential recruit goes “What benefits do you offer?”. The reality is that setting up benefits as a small business is a major admin overhead and hassle, and it’s something that’s mostly been reserved for employees in larger companies and corporations.

Yet research in the USA claims that 62% of employees under 50 wouldn’t consider a company if it didn’t offer voluntary benefits to employees — we suspect it might be a bit less in SA, but if you are shooting for the best kind of employees, it makes sense to want to pull from the largest pool and not disqualify your company for not offering a benefit.

This is a problem local startup Bento is tackling. Its digital platform simplifies the administration of benefits like retirement funds, medical aid, insurance, and wellness programmes while offering access to a host of modern workplace benefits such as Ollie.

It integrates with existing payroll systems and uses AI to provide personalised advice, reducing costs, improving transparency, and empowering employees to self-manage their benefits, helping SMEs attract and retain talent while improving employee well-being. Lekker.

2. PROMOTE THAT BNB

Making it Easy to Rank Way High

As of 2023, South Africa hosts approximately 65’000 Airbnb listings, a threefold increase from October 2017. Cape Town alone accounts for 18’264 of these listings! Add another estimated 5’800 guest houses and you have a whole bunch of accommodation trying to land your stay.

And whilst a good rating on Airbnb already does a lot, many larger establishments need to do more to make sure they rank high on Google, constantly have good content for social and can tell their story well.

The problem is however is that very few of these people can afford a content creator even on a freelance base.

Enter local AI startup, Smart Pineapple.

It uses AI coupled with typical templates that lodges, guesthouses or hotels would use to create social posts, newsletters, blog posts and even website content. It helps these organisations up their content game without breaking the bank.

‍

3. WHERE’S WILLEM?

Snapping those Fans in the Stands…

Think of some of SA’s iconic sporting moments. The Bokke winning the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Or Bafana Bafana winning the 1996 African Cup of Nations. Or The Proteas 438 cricket match in 2006. Truly “Where were you?” moments.

With cell phones and social media, for many people, it’s a big deal to show they were at the game. Cool for fans. But not so great for teams, stadiums and brands who might be left out of the convo. And sports brands like to be part of the online convo – we spoke about this in a previous Open Letter.

That’s why the team over at Fancam has built something awesome with their high-resolution, 360-degree gigapixel imagery

It is no longer a startup by any means, having been founded in 2010, but we bumped into one of the Fancam team members recently and heard they are killing it in the USA.

The concept is simple: High-res 360-degree cameras capture everyone in the stands before a game starts and fans can find themselves in the stands (in one massive pic with everyone else), tag themselves in the Fancam pic, and share it on their social channels (with a bit of customisable event/team/stadium branding).

Like they did at this recent event you might recognise…

Explore every part of this incredible, ultra high resolution, interactive, 360° image and share what you find with the world!

wwe.fancam.com/20250106?s=east-view&atv=2.68&ath=-0.321&fov=42.8

4. A WELCOME BREAK

Stand-in Medical Pros on Demand

The 34’033 private medical practices in South Africa all have a problem that is unique to their industry — most need to be open all the time. That means when any of the 360k odd workers in the private sector want to or need to take time off, the options are limited to:

• Close and lose customers for good (might be ok if you sell clothes, but get known as the medical practice that “isn’t open when you need them” and you might be out of business soon).
• Let other staff work longer or more shifts (not always feasible).
• Get a locum to stand in for you.

A locum, which comes from locum tenens (Latin for placeholder), refers to a professional who temporarily fills the duties of another. The concept is as old as the professional medical industry itself, but it hasn’t always been easy to find someone to replace you should an emergency pop up.

That’s what local scale-up LocumBase is solving. It’s a local online booking platform that allows Drs, nurses, vets, dentists, pharmacists and a whole host of other medical professionals to work as locums that medical practices can book based on their real-time availability, either by directly requesting a specific Llocum or creating an open offer that locums can apply to.   

With 800+ practices, 11’000+ locums, and more than R3.5 million already processed, we think they could be onto a model that solves a very real and painful problem for medical professionals…

5. FROM THE OPEN COLLAB COMMUNITY

Made in SA for SA

South Africa played a pivotal role in the global adoption of prepaid electricity meters. Back in 1993, we pioneered the Standard Transfer Specification (STS). This protocol standardised communication for prepaid meters and was recognised in 1997 as an open international standard, leading to widespread adoption of the protocol and prepaid electricity globally.

Coupled with local municipalities struggling to collect payments efficiently, it’s no wonder then that prepaid electricity really took off in SA where we have some 11.4 million prepaid electricity meters.

But prepaid doesn’t only benefit municipalities and Eskom — landlords can now better manage expenses by ensuring tenants pay for their own power.

Despite those upsides, the user experience isn’t always great. For one, property managers with various properties (think companies managing multiple metered Airbnbs or large corporate with multiple sites using prepaid meters). Managing these meters and buying for all of them from a central, remote location can be a nightmare.

That’s where local scale-up, Prepaid24 comes in.

Prepaid24 is the largest independent seller of prepaid electricity in South Africa and has been around since 2009. They built a platform that makes managing your multiple sites’ electricity a breeze. What’s more, with a large amount of purchase data and history, they use intelligence to very accurately predict when a property is running low on electricity, helping ensure the lights stay on.

Do you want to build with folks like Corné Lindeque from Prepaid24, and more? Join The Open Collab and work side-by-side with heavy hitters from the SA startup scene.

IN SHORT

Be the smartest parent on the school run…

💰 Startup Funding. Local SaaS startup The Awareness Company has landed R30 million in seed round funding from investors including NEXT176, Holocene, Catalyst Fund, E Squared, Aions, and Jozi Angels. The funding will go towards enhancing their product Hydra’s AI capabilities and boosting sales and marketing efforts. Congrats to The Awareness Company team and Co-Founders Shazia & Priaash, part of our Open Collab Community. 

🛌 Travel Funds. SA travel startup Conservio has raised R1 million in its second funding round. The funding round includes E4E Africa, Volve Capital, Living Hope Ventures and angel investors like African tech entrepreneur Jonathan Smith (Payfast), and will help Conservio grow its customer base and onboard more than 2’000 local properties to its portfolio. Nice one.

🔒 Locking it down. Local cyber security firm Nclose has just been acquired by Integrity360 for an undisclosed amount. The deal includes Nclose’s "Cyberfire", a creative and complementary MDR technology for SMEs and mid-market enterprises. ICYMI, we had Nclose’s Co-Founders Stephan and Martin on our Podcast in mid-2023. 

👖Jeans not selling over there? Local recommence startup FARO raised $6m to pursue their vision of bringing unsold inventory of the likes of Calvin Kein, Tommy Hilfiger and Zara to Africa and selling at reduced prices. Having launched in 2023, they have hit $2.3m in revenue from only four stores. Which goes to show just how much margin there is in premium clothing (even at a lower price)

🗓️ How AI Reminds You. Open AI is rolling out a new ChatGPT feature that will let you schedule tasks for ChatGPT to do later. So you could schedule something like writing a bedtime story at 8 PM every night or reminding you to switch on your geyser at 6 AM, or even remind you to press play on THAT Nickleback tune to get the braai started, and ChatGPT will send you a notification at the requested time. PS: Good luck getting that song out of your head now.

🏆 Mother City Champs (Pt. 2). Cape Town has just been named The Best City in the World by Time Out. After coming in 2nd last year, the Mother City took the top spot with only 2 other African cities, Marrakech (in 32nd place) and Lagos (in 41st place), making it into the top 50. Pretty cool – despite its traffic problems we lamented in Tuesday’s Open Letter.

CHECK THIS OUT

Make Yourself Wealthier on Autopilot

Without giving up on life’s little luxuries…

While it’s true that most very wealthy people make their money through entrepreneurship, those who invest are generally wealthier and live more comfortably than their peers who don’t.

In fact, did you know that if you invested just R1 000 per month in an average-performing fund that just regularly outpaces inflation, from age 25 to 60, you’ll accrue almost R4.5 million?

The best part of that is that a monthly R1 000 is small enough to allow you to still invest the bulk of your time and resources into building your business… the difference is you’ll have a cool R4.5 million waiting for you at 60, win or lose. 

To make it even better, if you put that R 1000 in a tax-free investment, you won’t have to pay any of that over to SARS.

So why don’t more people just drop that R1k per month on investment?

The best guess most pundits have is it's about education and behaviour:

• If you don’t know it’s that easy to build wealth, you can’t do it.
• And if you don’t build the habit of putting that R1k away monthly, you won’t have the prize at the end.

Ah, but we have a shortcut for you… Automated Investing.

Building Wealth While You Sleep

You see, saving and investing doesn’t mean you have to start packing sandwiches, making yourself coffee at home, sacrificing life’s little luxuries or lowering your standard of living.

One of the most impactful things you can do to build long-term wealth is automating your investments. Simply set up a system that invests a percentage of your income automatically every month, and you’re golden.

To start, set up a debit order with Fynbos Money and check out the powerful automation rules you can use to automatically allocate your investments.

Instagram post by @fynbosmoney

Automate my investments now

JOBS IN TECH

Switch it up in 2025…

👩🏼‍🔬 Senior Backend Engineer @ Cue

💡 Senior Machine Learning Engineer @ Lula

🎯 Software Development Engineer @ AnyVan

💬 Client Solutions Manager @ Voxeon

🧠 Financial Manager @ Bridgement

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

GAME TIME

Find zen with this ZA startup Haiku…

Swift hands clear the way,

Bringing order, ease, and care.

Who transforms your day?

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Pretty pictures? The last thing you’d have expected to come out of MIT’s AI lab (CSAIL) is billboards that change colour at different temperatures. But that’s exactly what they’ve unveiled, and in a world where everything’s gone digital, it’s refreshing to see people still innovating in niche spaces like printed media.

In this Open Letter:

• Level playing field: Helping SMEs get corporate clients, faster.
• LA’s fire app, Mother City traffic champs & Showmax’s livestream play.
• Assuring success: How to get a team of engineers to help you build.
• Did you know this ground-breaking SA startup? The results are in.
• Short on ideas? Share this and get 100+ SA startup ideas.

Together with:

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TRENDING NOW

Linking Corporates to Great Suppliers

Landing a big corporate client can change the world when you’re a new/small business, but it’s easier said than done. And not because the corporates are “being difficult”, there are valid reasons why they have protocols in place.

However, as economies grow (resulting in more buying options and requirements) and the world's connectivity making it easier to source from remote locations, procurement teams are finding it challenging to find the best suppliers who meet their mandates.

Today, we explore a South African startup that’s tackling this unique problem, let’s dive in.

How Big is Procurement in SA?

In SA, the Government spends nearly R1 trillion (around 12% of our GDP) procuring from businesses each year. The private sector has also spent a similar amount per year between 2011 and 2021 on investment in fixed assets such as infrastructure, machinery, and equipment.

Whilst the exact amount of procurement taking place in the private sector isn’t known, B2B payments in SA hit nearly $1 trillion in 2022.

There’s lots of money going around buying things, yet small businesses often find it hard to sell to large organisations. 

‍

Why can’t I just sell to them?

When you’re a small business yourself, buying and selling pretty much rests on the owner’s discretion. And, in most cases, the owner would act diligently with these funds as it’s in their own best interest to do so. 

But this model doesn’t work so well in large companies for mostly obvious reasons:

• The owners of listed companies mostly don’t work there (so it's not practical for them to decide where to spend).
• There are several departments or people within a company that need to procure.
• Spending needs to be monitored and managed in line with approved budgets.

That’s why the procurement function is often centralised, meaning that there is a department within an organisation that sources potential suppliers, approves purchasing, and tries to minimise the risk of misspending or even fraud. 

Who they buy from matters…

Another major consideration for SA companies is Enterprise and Supplier Development (ESD), an initiative aiming to empower more local suppliers and increase financial support for black-owned entities. 

It allows for companies to set aside between 1% and 3% of their Nett Profit After Tax (NPAT) to put towards procuring products and services from Exempted Micro-Enterprises (EMEs) (< R10 million annual revenue regardless of BEE score), and Qualifying Small Enterprises (QSEs) (R10–R50 million annual revenue).

This contributes to the organisation’s overall Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) Scorecard whilst supporting smaller businesses. And the budgets are significant. 

Take FirstRand, for example, 1% of net profit after tax lands R200m—R300m in this basket per year.

Now extrapolate that to the around 400 other JSE-listed companies alone (with similar numbers and then some), and it starts adding up.

The danger in getting it wrong…

The thing is, it’s not just about the BEE points. ESD forms part of the “Preferential Procurement” component, a “Priority Element” of a corporate’s B-BEE scorecard. And they need to achieve 40% of the subminimum score, or they get penalised 1 B-BEE level, which impacts who they can do business with elsewhere in their organisation or even results in fines. 

So, while centralised procurement helps combat fraud and manage spending, it does create major bottlenecks:

• They have so many departments to source and vet suppliers for
• And your central procurement person isn’t always an expert in the department’s subject matter.

And that’s why corporates so often miss out on engaging high-quality SMEs. 

This is the problem local startup Procure Africa is working to solve…

Small-businesses-to-corporate opportunities…

Procure Africa is a B2B marketplace that connects private sector buyer organisations to (mostly) small, township-owned suppliers through Requests For Quotations (RFQs) in the mining, construction, manufacturing, and renewable energy sectors.

It works by allowing organisations looking to buy products and services to create, send, receive, and manage RFQs via the Procure Africa platform. The platform automates a number of routine tasks like sending reminders to suppliers, generating reports, and creating purchase orders.

Buyers (corporates) can also find and compare various products and services from a large pool of vetted suppliers (SMEs), with vetting including everything from credentials to compliance and anything in between. This helps corporates fast-track discovering new suppliers and quickly evaluate their suitability. 

For SMEs, it’s a way to get on the corporates’ books, a little bit faster.

Procure Africa also lets organisations white-label the platform, so suppliers can onboard themselves directly on their own website. Noice!

With founders like Nyeko Mathebula and their teams building platforms that narrow the gap between trusted suppliers, and larger organisations with some cash to spend, we’re watching this space…

IN SHORT

Be the sharpest eagle at the water cooler…

⛏️ Can you dig it? African mining startups can apply for the timbuktoo MineTech Accelerator programme run by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the timbuktoo Africa Innovation Foundation, and National Institute for Scientific and Industrial Research (NISIR). It aims to give MineTech African startups access to networks, high-tech products, and financing. Nice one — applications close 13 Feb 2025.

🎹 Streaming Amapiano. Grammy-winning, Amapiano superstar Tyla is set to perform live on local streaming service Showmax’s platform this coming weekend. It’s the first time Showmax will live stream an event, and will serve as an opportunity to test its Peacock-powered platform’s powers. Hopefully, Showmax took a leaf out of the Paul/Tyson fight playbook…

🔥 LA Fire Updates. During the ongoing wildfires taking place in Los Angeles this past week, a fire-tracking app ”Watch Duty” was downloaded more than 2 million times and seen by 14 million unique users in the past week. It uses a network of retired firefighters, first responders, official government reports, and volunteer reporters. While tragic, still great to see tech helping keep people safe with real-time active fire updates…

🛻 Mother City Jams. Cape Town has earned the unwanted accolade of having the worst traffic in ZA with residents losing as much as 94 hours stuck in traffic (nearly twice as much as 2nd place Jozi). Not only that, but it’s ranked 7th on the global list of worst traffic behind big-hitters like NYC, London, and Paris. Perhaps it might get better now that the holidays are over…

🎯 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with the best in business strategy with Metavolve, investment, offshoring and startup legal insights with Dommisse Attorneys and 12 more vital startup tools & services.

CHECK THIS OUT

The Most Powerful Tech Investment a New Venture Can Make

Only a few startups make it past year 3, 5, 10 and onwards… But those that do have something in common – at some point in their journey (if only because their investors insist on it) they employ a Chief Technical Officer (CTO) to work directly with the CEO (leadership).

Why? CTOs are highly skilled and highly experienced technical professionals, with a much broader scope of understanding than normal devs – in fact, most CTOs are engineers and themselves founders.

They fill the unique function of strategic tech overview, i.e. they deeply understand the company’s vision and ensure that every tech investment enables that vision in the future.

What’s the difference? Your normal tech hires, like developers or even a dev agency, usually only execute what you tell them. A CTO will have the clout, ability and experience to truly challenge even a founder or CEO to ensure your tech is 100% what your company needs for the future.

And it really matters:

• One Turkish university showed that ventures that employ a CTO are more profitable.
• Researchers at Princeton found that a CTO’s influence on tech and strategy greatly improves organisational performance.
• One venture-building firm showed that companies with CTOs are more competitive in their markets.

That’s why many VCs and investors will often require scale-ups to have a CTO in place to access more funding.

The Scarcity Conundrum

Great CTOs are so sought-after, in fact, that the companies who really need them – startups – simply can’t afford them. And that’s why we in SA have Octoco.

It stands for Outsourced CTO Company. And, as the name suggests, it’s similar to having an outsourced/fractional CFO (finance), but just for your tech function. Basically, it’s a fractional CTO – you can’t afford one full-time, but you can afford to get a CTO team onboard for a few hours a week.

And it Really Works…

The ventures that have used Octoco are able to grow faster, turn a profit quicker and build more complex tech in a fraction of the time than their competitors can…

Take, for instance:

• Picklogger was able to reduce farmers’ orchard performance analysis from once-per-season to instant with GPS and accelerometer-enabled pruning sheers that track every cut and snip thanks to Octoco.
• Henlo Coffee was able to produce one of the most advanced AI-enabled coffee machines that save hospitality owners thousands on wastage and barista training.
• Flexistore was able to build one of the first fully digital public storage and warehousing solutions in the world that’s totally scalable, allowing them to expand to new locations as fast as they can raise capital.
• LeaseSurance was able to go from a simple dev-agency-built MVP to full roll-out (with profitability in sight) in just 5 months, thanks to Octoco.

See more remarkable startups fast-tracked by Octoco’s fractional CTO insights right here.

If you’re serious about making this your year, get the right tech partner on board for 2025.

Get me Octoco right now

HAPPENING SOON

Upcoming Events

17 January 2025 — Sales Masterclass — Online: Come learn and ask questions directly to pros — exclusive to members of The Open Collab community.

24 January 2025 — Offshoring Case Study — AMA: Get firsthand insights into what it takes to take your company global from SA — exclusive to members of The Open Collab community.

31 January 2025 — Fundraising 101 — AMA: We’ve invited founders and teams who’ve recently raised funding to give you the ins and outs of securing investment —exclusive to members of The Open Collab community.

View all our upcoming events here.

BUILDING TOGETHER

Happening over at The Open Collab

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

• Started the year off right with in-person coffee meetups in Cape Town and Stellenbosch ☕
• Discussed UFC's president Dana White joining the Meta board — and musing if Zuck's prepping for a fight against Musk.
• Helped Wynand discover a load of powerful team-based WhatsApp solutions for customer support.
• Helped connect Richard to a promising local provider for support.
• Explored Nvidia's big new personal "supercomputer" play (an affordable desktop with the ability to run complex processing for AI).
• Celebrated Christian's start on the Lula team 🎉
• Welcomed more awesome new members!

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

An SA first…

Last Friday, we riddled you which SA startup created one of the world’s first mobile payment solutions back in 2007, and only a quarter of respondents recognised Bevan Ducasse’s WiGroup (former) from Cape Town…

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨 MobiPay (67%)

🟩🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ WiGroup (26%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ CellCash (7%)

Your 2 cents…

Ha ha, oh yes, Thabo, pretty sure they wished they used “MobiPay” when they launched. Incidentally, WiGroup sold and merged with a UK FinTech called YoYo in 2020, and is now part of the YoYo Group. 💸

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It’s alive? Forget The Fly, Australians are so fed up with insecticide-resistant mosquitoes, they’re gene-splicing male mozzies with spiders and venomous sea anemones, so instead of breeding, they kill off all the females. Sheez.

It’s Fast-Five Friday! That’s 5 startups doing big things in 5 minutes — let’s dive in…

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1. STAY SAFE 

SA’s 30 Million Private Eyes…

It’s no secret that crime’s a major challenge in SA. With 1 cop for every 420-odd citizens, and despite there being 4x as many private security personnel as policemen, South Africans are up against it.

But even with a small police force, crime can be reduced if there is enough data. The problem, however, is that only about half of all crime is actually reported to the police. A large part of this data does exist, mostly in WhatsApp community groups, and that’s what local safety platform startup Wolf is tapping into.

Leveraging WhatsApp, a platform that nearly 29 million South Africans use pretty much all the time, Wolf provides an accessible way to report suspicious activity and crime by simply forwarding your community WhatsApp incident reports to their bot.

Then, using machine learning, it analyses data to predict potential threats and optimise the patrol routes for response teams while providing users with insights into what’s happening in their area — all in an effort to be smarter and prevent crime that way.

Once the adoption is good, it will provide super valuable information for government and community leaders by solving SA’s under-reporting issues.   

2. IT’S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN

Writing your Final Love Letter…

Dying without a Will in SA is a fun time – except of course for your loved ones who are then subject to the terms of SA’s Intestate Succession Act. Without a proper Will in place, the deceased’s estate gets divvied up according to legislation in a specific order, which becomes complicated when you consider that not everyone has a spouse or kids, or parents and grandparents.

And no one wants their deadbeat cousin Jimmy walking away with all their stuff simply because there’s a shared bloodline – or worse still, fall to the State. What’s really weird is that more than 85% of South Africans DO NOT have a will in place when they die… and perhaps it’s got to do with people hating to talk about death or simply the expected laborious process of setting it up.

Local scale-up, QuickWill (as the name suggests) offers a web & mobile platform for South Africans to quickly draft their Will using a guided wizard in as little as 4 steps. It can also keep your Will safe and act as an executor. And, since it’s online, you can come back and update your Will as you wish, whenever you wish. No more excuses…

Hard to choose when, erm, you can’t

3. BACK TO SCHOOL

Class is Now in Session…

With the new school year kicking off on Wednesday, nearly 1 million students will start matric, with many hoping to continue to some form of tertiary education when leaving school. But space is limited: public universities could only take about 200’000 first-time entrants in 2023. 

Local startup, Matric Live is an educational app aimed at helping matric learners supplement the learning happening in class, with contextual and visual examples for more than 16 matric subjects. The platform also offers matrics past exam papers that they can actually write, and with a built-in gamification element, students can challenge their friends on competitive exams to earn points (not to mention playground bragging rights).  

Matric Live has been going since 2017, with the first year of Covid seeing more than 630’000 students joining, earning it the Breakthrough Solution of the Year at the 2020 MTN Business App of the Year awards.

With competition so stiff to get a job in SA, and only around 20% of matrics getting a spot at an SA university, Matric Live might just give them the advantage they need.

‍

4. FROM THE OPEN COLLAB COMMUNITY

More Money in the Pockets of Small-Scale Farmers…

For a small-scale farmer, getting their produce to your table can be a painful exercise…

Especially considering how much of the margins go towards transport (35%), commissions for warehousing (5%), and market agents (7.5%).

Local AgriTech founder Zamokuhle Thwala is on a mission to help change that with AgriKool, a marketplace with transparent, ethical pricing that connects small and medium-sized producers and retail buyers.

This gives producers more transparency, with an eye on increasing their revenue and profit margins (while they focus on what they do best: farm). Buyers, on the other hand, can now buy directly from the producer – saving time and money – via AgriKool’s secure platform.

They have made great traction, helping smaller-scale farmers offset produce at the likes of Boxer and Shoprite.

Zamokuhle is part of our founder community over at The Open Collab. With more than 80 SA founders and operators, The Open Collab is SA’s premium network for all things SA startups and scale-ups.

Join The Open Collab

5. START WITH A BANG

Fill your 2025 Sales Pipeline

It’s time to hit the ground running – not just with warm leads, but good ones…

Problem: Most people believe you can just pay and spray with spammy LinkedIn outreach campaigns – you know, those messages from complete strangers that you ALWAYS IGNORE (just like most everyone else). Heck, even if people sometimes have some success with those things, you have to wonder if that client is even worth having ‘cos wow.

Leads don’t work that way because you can’t fool people into becoming good customers. And the way into the hearts and minds of your ideal target is often good old-fashioned trust, honesty and hard work.

Over at Stream (created and operated by the founders of The Open Letter), we found it pays to put your money where your mouth is and show potential customers why you are the best to work with. It works in 3 key steps:

1. Presence: Can they find you (SEO and socials) and do you communicate with enough substance to guide good decisions? 
2. Awareness: Will you be the first one they think of when they’re ready to buy? Are your insights resonating, showing up and keeping you top of mind?
3. Nurture: Does your content help them understand their challenges better? And, more importantly, does it tie their solution back to you?

Most brands do one, maybe two of these. But it’s only when you do all three that things start singing.

Wanna know how?

Book a FREE content strategy session with the Stream team before 17 January 2025.

Get Stream Now

IN SHORT

Never get short-changed in conversation again…

🤯 Crazy CES Tech. The Consumer Electronics Show 2025 was in full swing this week, with some pretty wild announcements and reveals like a 40-mile range solar-powered electric car, an air-purifying cat perch, heating and compression recovery boots, a toaster that “recharges” your iPhone in 2 seconds, and a robot vacuum that also tidies. All this in Januworry…

🌪️ Tackling the Climate Crisis. Innovate47, a Pakistani-based accelerator has expanded its Climate Action Accelerator programme to African founders in climate and sustainability startups from South Africa, Malawi, Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria. The 3-month programme aims to accelerate solutions to address the global climate crisis. How’s that Greta?

🧨 Dynamite Supercomputer. Nvidia announced its AI supercomputer, Project Digits recently. And it’s going for a cool 57’000 rondt. The supercomputer comes with Nvidia’s GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, offering “a petaflop of AI computing performance for prototyping, fine-tuning and running large AI models,”. This could very well be the start of AI running on your local machine as opposed to the cloud.

🥸 Made in China. Naspers and Prosus shares dropped by more than 9% and 8.75%, respectively, after a report by the US Defence Department labelled Tencent (of which Naspers and Prosus are 25% shareholders) and several other companies as “Chinese military entities” operating in the US. Well, I’ll be…

🔎 Fact-Checking is Dead. Meta is ending its 3rd-party fact-checking programme in the US, and adopting a Community Notes programme — just like X. Meta admits that while they removed millions of pieces of content each day during December (which in itself is concerning), only 1 or 2 didn't actually violate its policies. Hmmmm… if you wouldn't say it to someone's face, don’t type it in the Facebook comments.

⚖️ Legal Chihuahua. A local law firm is finding itself in hot water after it used “non-existent legal citations” in both written submissions and arguments in a court case, apparently sourced by AI. Of the 9 cases cited, only two have been found to exist. *Cue asking ChatGPT to write the judge a formal apology without admitting fault.

It Costs $0 to Look This Good

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JOBS IN TECH

New Year. New Role.

👩‍💻 Principal Product Manager — Technical @ Amazon Web Services (AWS)

🤳 Lead App Developer (Remote) @ ScorePlay

👩‍🎨 Creative Lead @ The Sourcing Lab

🤖 Head of Digital @ OneDayOnly

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

GAME TIME

Did you know?

A South African startup developed one of the world's first mobile payment platforms back in 2007, enabling mobile phones to be used for payments long before mobile wallets became mainstream globally.

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Healthier 2025? STEM researchers have been busy over the holidays, announcing some medical breakthroughs in blood-based implants that heal bone faster and even 3D-printed organs grown inside a human body for space-age healing like RoboCop. Aitsa.

In this Open Letter:

• Smart investments: Helping more South Africans build wealth.
• SA’s Chinese EV boost, AI for your TV & child maintenance tracking.
• Cheat codes: How successful founders build businesses that last.
• Which startup sectors will rule in 2025: The results are in.
• Lonely building your startup? Join The Open Collab and get support.

Together with:

‍

TRENDING NOW

A Startup Boosting More Young South Africans to “Wealthy” Status

South Africa has one of the lowest national savings rates (the amount of households, businesses, and governments that save money rather than spend everything) in the world. We save on average an abysmal 0.5% of income, well below that of places like Brazil (at 16.9%), the US (12.4%), and India (just under 11%).

At a household level, 76% of South Africans run out of money before month-end, with an average of 62% of their take-home pay going towards debt repayments.

Additionally, most people don’t start thinking about retirement or long-term saving until they’re 40+, with nearly 60% of South Africans believing that long-term & retirement savings and investments are unaffordable. 

And by the time we reach retirement age, only 6% of us are on track to retire comfortably.

It’s a major challenge not often spoken about, and today, we feature a local startup building to solve this. More on this later…

Why saving matters

As a country, individual savings are quite helpful for several reasons which include:

• Lowers people’s over-indebtedness, which improves financial well-being and reduces risk in the financial system.
• People who cannot afford to retire, cannot buy stuff and do not contribute to the economy, which holds back economic growth.
• Without savings for retirement, more people will become dependent on SA’s already buckling grant system (28 million grant recipients vs 7.4 million income taxpayers).

Untaxing the savers…

As a measure to try and encourage households to save more, the SA government introduced legislation for tax-free savings accounts (TFSAs) back in March 2015.

It’s worked well elsewhere. In 1999, the UK introduced a similar ax-exempt Individual Savings Account (ISA). Over the last twenty-odd years, 20 million Adult ISA accounts have been opened, and they now hold a combined market value of £620 billion. 

What benefit is there in a South African TFSA? Well, buying shares in listed companies requires tax returns for any returns those shares deliver. For example, when there is a dividend (you make some money), it's a taxation event (you get taxed on it and have to pay SARS some of your earnings if they go above the annual threshold… yes, it’s complicated).

Normally, this tax can range between 10% and 37%, so getting it tax-free annually, forever, is quite a saving.

Sounds like a great deal. Well, there is a slight catch:

• You can only invest a total of R500k in your lifetime.
• And you can only invest up to R36’000 per year (which means it will take you 14 odd years to max it out).
• Finally, if you withdraw from it, you will not get your allocation back. If you cap it out at R500k and withdraw, say, R300k, you will not be allowed to add anything more to it — only that which is left will stay.

Off to a slow start…

Official stats on the uptake of TFSAs since 2015 are somewhat inconsistent, but some sectors of the industry have suggested it has been “sluggish.” 

The reasons for sluggish uptake aren’t clear, it is likely a combination of not having the funds to do it, not understanding the benefits of it or simply that most financial advisors are heavily incentivised to sell certain products, and with an R36k a year cap on your investment into TFSA, it’s not really a money spinner for them (remember, they work on commission for the products they sell – we wrote about it in this Open Letter from last year). 

The local startup making saving easy

If financial advisors aren’t going to make enough money to promote the product, a platform could be a game-changer, not only for the business but also for the good of SA consumers.

And that’s what the team at Fynbos Money is building. 

Fynbos Money is a local investment platform that wants to make it easy to just get going with long-term savings and investments. Their main objective is to get young South Africans into savings.

First, by helping you get an emergency savings account up (if you have one, you can skip theirs) and then get into a Tax-Free Savings Account. It’s all automated, your monthly debit order keeps your emergency savings topped up while also maximising your annual TFSA benefit. And as a customer, you can select funds from top-tier TFSA such as Allan Gray, FNB, Sygnia, 10x, 1nvest, and Satrix.

We spoke to Fynbos Money Founder Adrian Hope-Bailie recently, and they’ve got a big 2025 planned, including the launch of their paid “Protea” tier, which is a complete savings and investment portfolio management product in one place for a single monthly subscription. 

With more flat-fee and subscription-based financial service providers popping up to take on the old-school financial behemoths by offering transparent, simplistic financial products for a tech-savvy generation, we’re watching this space…

CHECK THIS OUT

Building a Business That Thrives Beyond the 5-Year Mark

In South Africa, research from the University of the Western Cape shows that 70% to 80% of small businesses don’t survive beyond five years.

The good news? Those who succeed often share a common trait — a strong grasp of their finances.

It’s not just about numbers. It’s about planning ahead, knowing when to push for growth, and preparing for the challenges that come with it.

Backing Yourself & Your Team

Whether it’s managing cash flow, securing funding, or staying on top of tax deadlines, having a clear financial strategy can make all the difference.

“As businesses grow, things naturally get more complicated,” says Etienne Raubenheimer, Head of CFO Services at Outsourced CFO. “The right financial guidance doesn’t just help you survive tough times — it helps you spot opportunities and grow smarter.”

That’s why all the most successful companies have top-tier CFOs.

CFO expertise is so sought-after, in fact, few startups can afford to employ one full-time… And that’s why there’s Outsourced CFO, a fractional CFO service that gives you a top-shelf CFO, as and when you need them, at a fraction of the cost.

Getting CFO insights as a startup is one of the best ways to ensure your business not only survives but thrives past the 5-year mark and beyond.

Start with as little as 8 hours a month

IN SHORT

Start the year a little smarter…

⚖️ Tipping the Scales. Local startup Social Justice has launched the “Coparent App” for separated parents with customisable contact schedules, instant messaging with a language filter, secure document storage, and monthly maintenance obligations tracker (housing, food, clothing, education and medical care). Probably going to save divorcees several awkward conversations.

📺 AI.TV. Samsung has launched an AI offering for its premium line of TVs. Called Vision AI, Samsung’s AI-powered screens can now search the internet for information on what's on the screen — like a specific actor, or product, as well as real-time translations and personalised background images. No more “what movie is that guy in again” convos.

📚 AI Africa Rising. The University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) has launched a new AI institute to focus on fundamental AI research that’ll drive scientific discoveries and grow Africa’s AI expertise called the Machine Intelligence and Neural Discovery (MIND) Institute. Nice to see SA pushing to lead in the AI conversation.

🚙 Powering SA’s EV Scene. SA’s automotive industry could see a boost in EV investment after President Ramaphosa signed a tax break into law recently. Three Chinese automakers are already in talks with SA’s Automotive Business Council to bring electric- and hydrogen-powered vehicle production to local shores. Seems like the stars are aligning for a big shift to EVs locally.

🤖 Going Big on Bots. Global leader in AI chip development, Nvidia, is apparently turning its attention to robotics as a future area of growth after seeing a flood of new competition in the once lucrative AI chip business. The intersection between AI and robotics will certainly give them an edge.

😎 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, all your accounting sorted with Xero and 12 more vital startup tools & services.

BUILDING TOGETHER

Happening over at The Open Collab

Well, most of us took a break over the holidays, but, you know, hustlers still be hustlin’ rain or shine…

• Speculated on Tyme Group’s $250M raise to tackle the South-East Asian market — threatening to become a bigger banking story than Capitec 👀
• Started the holidays strong with special startup book deliveries for new members.
• Learnt we are getting our first live and in-person Masterclass session in February 🤯🤩🔥
• Voted on whether we want normal online Office Hours this week — or in-person coffees together in JHB, Cape Town and Stellenbosch.
• Celebrated The Open Letter’s 400%-plus growth in 2024 (hitting over 16k subs over the break) and looking forward to more awesomeness in 2025!

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

17 January 2025 — Sales Masterclass — Online: Come learn and ask questions directly to pros — exclusive to members of The Open Collab community.

24 November 2025 — Offshoring Case Study — AMA: Get firsthand insights into what it takes to take your company global from SA — exclusive to members of The Open Collab community.

31 January 2025 — Fundraising 101 — AMA: We’ve invited founders and teams who’ve recently raised funding to give you the ins and outs of securing investment —exclusive to members of The Open Collab community.

View all our upcoming events here.

WHAT YOU SAID

Chasing the big payday…

We asked which startup sectors will drive the biggest exits in 2025, and many lean towards AI…

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🌍 FinTech & Payments (17%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🤖 Gotta be AI & Analytics (23%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💼 Must be HR Tech & Workforce Tools (3%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🌱 Climate & Sustainability (8%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 💊 HealthTech & Wellness (15%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📦 E-commerce & Logistics (12%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🎮 Gaming & Entertainment (3%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🔐 Cybersecurity (9%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🚗 Mobility & Transport (6%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🎟️ Other – tell us what you think… (4%)

Your 2 cents…

Nice one, Mark! Did you see that time we looked at local startups using AI in the security industry? It’s an exciting space and there’s loads of room for innovation. 🦾

Ho ho, KNT, yeh that’s a big one. Just intelligence to impact the insurance money on cargo alone is probably already big business. 💡

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