Always upright {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? The world’s first self-stabilising motorcycle is entering production. Basically a bike with a built-in robot brain, check out its crazy balance. 🤯

In This Open Letter

Also, see some of the most surprising and unique ways SA founders are using AI.

SA spends a lot on private security, including thousands of CCTV cameras we can’t use fully because of POPIA restraints – but this AI has a way around that…

Private security in SA is a R55-R200bn (depending on who you ask) industry – not surprising as we have 18 times more private security personnel than police officers (2.7M vs 150k). But we also have a small army of security cameras.

The Gauteng government alone has over 6’400 cameras, with 400 more on the way soon, and not counting SANRAL’s network of cameras covering 200km of highway. And that’s just one province.

So, why isn’t SA way better at crime detection and prevention?

The human (and legal) element

SA is one of the world’s Top 5 high-crime countries, but we have significantly higher security camera densities than the other four, so what gives?

Well, an estimated 70-80% of SA’s thousands of private camera networks are reactionary – they record, but it’s only reviewed afterwards.

The few systems that have human operators battle because human accuracy detection scores decrease with more cameras (dropping as much as 32% going from 1 screen to 9), meaning large command-and-control setups require 8–10 operators per rotation (at serious security-grade salaries), across three shifts, chasing up prices.

But a relatively new concern is how POPIA affects camera use. POPIA considers any image or video “personal information”, creating a whole host of legal hurdles for anyone wanting to use them.

The result? SA malls and retailers are sitting on camera systems they can't fully activate because POPIA compliance around cloud-based AI is still so murky.

One new company has a plan for that, though…

The local venture adding more eyes to cameras

Safeza is a local security tech startup trying to solve the limitations of the control room by bolstering the cameras and humans already working in it.

Built on top of Swiss-engineered AI called AVA-X, the system does facial recognition and object detection in real time, scoring 99.82% accuracy on the Labelled Faces in the Wild benchmark (higher than Google's FaceNet).

Here’s a look at AVA-X tech:

We caught up with Safeza founder and CEO, Armand de Beer, who stumbled onto the technology through his work in European defence circles and wanted to test it in SA alongside Juan Solms, who handles their business development.

Safeza has three modes: An Investigation mode that can find a face or object in stored footage, a Live feature that does the same across live feeds and an Access feature that layers it into access control – only let certain people into certain places.

But it has a superpower 

Safeza can get around murky POPIA legislation because it doesn't need to store any footage to be effective. It can process the stream, run the matches and get the job done without unnecessary records. 

Doesn’t hurt that it runs on-premises, on your own GPU stack, either.

We’re watching this space…

How to actually automate business tasks with AI: Using Claude, Skills is the difference between a normal chatbot and an actual agent. Here's how to use skills to automate a business process. Learn it here.

Need a productivity boost? Before every meeting or deep work session, try the 5-5-5-5 breathing hack to get more oxygen to your brain and be more effective. Practise it here.

AI standup today. At 8:30 today, The Founder Collab is meeting for our bi-weekly stand-up on streamlining your business with AI. Real SA founders share how they use AI, what works and what doesn’t. Live. Don’t miss it.

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🙂 Happy Days. Local FinTech Happy Pay has just closed a $5 million seed round led by Partech, bringing its full funding to ~$7.5 million, following a $1.8 million pre-seed in late 2024. Nicely done, team Happy Pay.

🛒 Going Shopping. The Vukile Property Fund has just agreed to acquire the Botshabelo Mall, in the Free State’s largest township (population just under 200K), for a cool R443 million. Love to see it.

🥽 DIY Chips. Elon Musk is reportedly getting into the semiconductor manufacturing game ‘cause existing companies aren’t producing fast enough. He’s planning a Terafab facility to build chips that can support 100 to 200 gigawatts of computing power per year on Earth. Terafabulous.

🚉 Going Places. The winners of SA’s Red Bull Basement are Shaqeel Less and Makhi Mangxola from Uthutho, an app that organises public transport information. They’re heading to the World Finals in San Francisco later this year. Lekker man.

⏱️ Payroll 8× Faster. Cape Union Mart’s payroll team was stuck fixing errors and fighting downtime. So Deel Local Payroll, powered by PaySpace, replaced the old system with a cloud platform that cut payroll processing from 4 days to just half a day.*

Yesterday, we showed you FitSorted, SA's first WhatsApp calorie tracker, asking if you've got a gripe with logging food intake. Most say no tracking for them, thanks…

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤦 The fact that I have to sucks (14%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🥗 That it takes me like 10 steps to do so (20%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤷 What on earth is an ounce in grams? (13%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 😡 Can't find more than half the stuff I eat on there (21%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🙅 Nope. No tracking for me, thanks (32%)

Your 2 cents…

50 years and still going strong, Chris — some systems just don't need an upgrade. 🥩🍷

On 24 March 2001, Apple released Mac OS X 10.0, the first public version of Steve Jobs’ Unix-based NeXT tech, which, some say, saved Apple from near collapse in the late 90s by bringing back stability and performance to Mac operating systems and, of course, Steve Jobs to the company.

It was actually codenamed Cheetah, but that was never made public. The official naming didn’t apply to X until Mac OS X 10.3, which was Jaguar, of course.

🪑 Tool to Try: Seating Hero lets you create seating charts with drag-and-drop tables, live layout updates and easy guest management.

☀️ Next Level: Floating solar farms in China generate power while reducing water evaporation.

🤖 Hack: A guide to 20 YouTube channels to learn AI.

🎧 Wow Site: Midlife Engineering is an ambient music generator you can run straight in your browser.