🔥 How to Live 5-10 Years Longer
Too soon? A little frustrated with how fast tech is evolving (and affecting his career opportunities), one NY artist opened the world’s first co-working space for AI chatbots. The art installation is a reminder that a world without humans isn’t much of anything… 📦
In this Open Letter:
- Making an impact: The startup helping people live 5-10 years longer.
- AI jet fighters, CPT desalination & WhatsApp in any language.
- Constantly falling behind? It’s not you, it’s your resourcing (here’s the fix).
- Who knew this SA logistics tracking startup? The results are in.
- Lonely building your startup? Join The Open Collab and get support.
Cape Town, are you ready?!
We are hosting our first Cape Town in-person gathering of the year on the 22nd of May at Innovation City Cape Town.
Featuring
A fireside chat with two of SA’s hottest FinTechs right now: Trevor Gosling (Co-Founder & CEO of Lula) and Kiaan Pillay (Co-Founder & CEO of Stitch).
PLUS
Side-panels on fundraising, early-stage venture building and great networking.
Come engage SA’s most vibrant startup community in person. Get your tickets now!
Early Bird tickets available + use OPENLETTER50 to get R50 off, exclusive to readers of The Open Letter
TRENDING NOW
How to Live 5-10 Years Longer
In today’s Tuesday Deep Dive, we look at the poor state of preventative care in South Africa and meet a local startup solving for a better way to get people healthy (and living longer)…
“I feel fine.”
We’ve all said that the doc, but in reality, being healthy isn’t just about how you feel.
In South Africa, non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, cancer and chronic respiratory illnesses have seen a steady 58.7% increase in deaths over the last two decades.
In fact, the WHO reckons that with proper preventative care, most people could probably live 5–10 years longer.
Problem is: we have great preventative healthcare (better than ever before in history), but people just aren’t using it. Nationwide screening rates for chronic diseases of lifestyle (CDL) are only around 20%.
And therein lies the rub. There’s a gap between diagnosing diseases and preventative treatments that shows up as a major flaw in our healthcare system: Patient care is predominantly reactive, addressing illnesses only after the symptoms have already manifested.
And it’s crazy to think that as much as 80% of heart diseases could be prevented by making some lifestyle changes. But how can you know which changes to make if you’re not getting screened for it while you still seem “healthy”?
The hidden cost of inaction
Aside from the obvious reasons you’ll want to catch a chronic disease early, South Africans are also pretty bad at adhering to medication (once a disease has been detected) – somewhere between 7% and 83.5% of us don’t adhere to prescriptions (LOL, what a wild range!).
This means everything from wasted meds, disease progression, reduced functional abilities, a lower quality of life and an increased use of medical resources like nursing homes and hospital visits.
But it has economic repercussions too: sick days cost our economy an estimated R19 billion every year, and about 15% of SA employees are absent on any given day.
Pre-emptive healthcare could just be the key to solving some of SA’s major healthcare challenges…
The local player driving proactive patient care
Engage Mx is a local HealthTech platform designed to give doctors more accurate data, so they can reach the right patients before it's too late.
Integrating directly into a provider’s billing software, it layers in medication and laboratory data (which is often housed in other disjointed, siloed systems) to build a unique health and risk profile for every patient.
Then Engage Mx identifies who’s overdue for important medical interventions and contacts the patient on their doctor’s behalf via SMS, email or WhatsApp, helping bring the patient back to the provider for care.
The system runs in the background, with no extra admin required, giving medical providers a structured, data-driven way to ensure preventative care. It can even be tailored to match regional clinical guidelines and patient demographics.
A healthier South Africa
We recently caught up with Engage Mx Co-founder and CEO Dr Benji Ozynski, who says the medical practices already using the platform are seeing a 37% increase in screening rates and 35% improvement in patients returning for follow-up care – a mega-important step in managing chronic and long-term conditions.
Some healthcare providers report a 25% reduction in complications tied to chronic illnesses, quite likely due to earlier detection and more consistent monitoring.
With platforms like Engage Mx helping make proactive, personalised healthcare more achievable, one flagged file, one reminder message and one early check-up at a time, we’re watching this space…
CHECK THIS OUT
You’re Not Behind — You’re Under-Resourced
And the difference really matters…
Most high-growth businesses don’t stall because of bad planning.
They stall because finance becomes the bottleneck – they don’t have the right people in place when it counts.
Without enough financial firepower, your best strategies can slow down, your growth targets slip, and your funding goals get harder to hit. It’s not about trying harder.
It’s about resourcing smarter.
Here are 3 powerful ways to scale finance capacity without missing a beat
✅ Cover critical gaps: If a key finance team member heads out on maternity leave, plug in top-tier interim talent to keep your momentum.
✅ Sharpen your growth strategy: Bring in a part-time CFO to balance growth and profitability without taking on full-time cost and risk.
✅ Boost firepower for crunch time: Facing year-end deadlines, audits, or system upgrades? Drop in a project-based finance team to handle the load expertly.
Ready to scale like you mean it?
🎯 Book a session with OCFO and access the finance talent that turns strategy into traction.
IN SHORT
Catching up after the holidays…
🚰 Water Wise. Cape Town’s R8.5 billion Faure New Water Scheme is set to start utilising purified sea and waste water from 2030/2031. The scheme aims to produce as much as 100 million litres of purified, recycled drinking water per day (about 10% of the city’s daily usage). Dunno, hey. How clean can you really get it…
🤝 Switch it up. WhatsApp has just launched in-chat translations, allowing users to translate specific chats with different people into the required language, which is great for international businesses. Still early days though, so translations are lightweight, leaving a little room for error, and doesn't support any African languages just yet. Perhaps Zuck should get some advice from Startup of the Year 2025 winner, Botlhale AI…
🤖 FighterJetPT. Seems like AI-piloted fighter jets might not be so far-fetched, with systems enabled by AI already demonstrating “superior performance” in military exercises. While it has some benefits to kinematic performance and decision-making time, the jury is still out on whether we’re entirely comfortable with AI selecting and engaging targets autonomously. Should be fine…
😎 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with easy-peasy business valuations with bizval, hardware, software, acceleration and funding for remarkable builds with Octoco and loads more vital startup tools & services.
BUILDER’S CORNER
3 Tips for Business Builders
Brought to you by Stream — high-quality written content to grow your brand.
Building an online business today is about more than just a good idea — it’s about finding the right people, learning from those who’ve done it before and staying close to where new ideas are taking shape. Converge Africa 2025 brings together founders, entrepreneurs and e-commerce leaders for two days of connection and conversation. It’s happening 7–8 May, and if you’re part of The Open Letter community, you can attend the expo for free — just use code 0PV1S when you register. Get tickets here.
Applications are open for the first intake of the timbuktoo Creatives Lab, aimed at powering innovation in the cultural and creative industries, with space for 15 creative businesses in SA across the audio-visual, design, music and multi-media industries, as well as organisations aligned to Cultural & Natural Heritage Preservation. Nice one. Applications close 7 May 2025…
Using ChatGPT as your co-founder? Then you prolly need this list of prompts for 18 different startup roles. From developing your marketing strategy to defining S.M.A.R.T goals, these prompts can help you supercharge your startup build.
BUILDING TOGETHER
Happening over at The Open Collab
In the last few days alone, in our online network, we…
- Had a remarkable scaling masterclass with Edge Growth’s Jason Goldberg.
- Got busy setting up a few padel games in Joburg and Cape Town 🎾.
- Helped Lenard with some options for tracking movement in a retail environment.
- Looking 👀 to help Elijah find a lekker place to stay in Stellenbosch.
- Obvs relaxing a bit over the long weekend… 😎
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 network.
WHAT YOU SAID
To the stores…
Last Friday, we riddled you about an SA startup changing how we scan products and pallets in warehousing, and quite a few recognised DroneScan…
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🚁 StockFly (12%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 📦 DroneScan (66%)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📊 ScanLogic (15%)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🔄 AeroSort (7%)
Your 2 cents…
Glad you liked the riddle, Mahlangu! 🎮
Hi EJ, that’s what every business owner is asking: How do I reach my audience to sell more? And the answer is almost always: create a distribution channel, market, build trust and then flywheel. Usually, it starts with the founder cold-calling and making the first sales up to Rand X. If you want to shorten the time to get traction, check out the 3 ways we can help you in the footer of this email. 🚀
BEFORE YOU GO
Here are 3 Ways We Can Help You
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Startup Community — Join 100+ SA founders in our SA startup founder community called The Open Collab. Weekly online masterclasses, in-person and online meetups and a network like never before.
Until next time,
Elvorne, Renier & Jason
