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Ready for the robot uprising? Well, the bots need a lil’ more time to prepare, if we check the footage of the world’s first robot kickboxing tournament in China last week. To be fair, the bots didn’t get any of the usual Robot Wars-style saws and flamethrowers to play with, but soon, we hope. 🦾

First, though, it’s time for another Fast-Five Friday: 5 things in startup you should know, in 5 minutes. Let’s go!

SME Owners: Ready to Ride the E-Commerce Boom?

The rise of digital convenience is reshaping how South Africans shop — and how SMEs must grow. Whether you sell online or not, the next wave of digital transformation is already here.

And, on 4 June, we’re going to unpack all the latest trends and growth opportunities in SA’s e-commerce space and more…

E-Commerce and Beyond: How to Leverage Digital Innovation for SME Growth is your roadmap to what’s next, featuring Lula’s Clinton Thomas and the Open Letter’s own Renier Kriel.

✅ What SA’s e-commerce boom means for every small business
✅ How to overcome digital hurdles — and pick the right tools to scale
✅ Cash flow, funding and banking tips to power sustainable growth

📅 4 June | 🕚 11:00 AM–12:00 PM | 📍 Live on Zoom

Free to attend — register now to secure your spot.

Reserve your seat now →

Lula. Powering SA SME growth.

1. KEPT IN THE LOOP

Cashless minibus ride-shares

Did you know more than half (63%) of formal SA business customers still choose to pay with cash? It’s like 95% in informal sectors, so you can bet when the taxi industry moves 16 million South Africans every day, at an average of around R12 a trip, that’s a lot of cash flowing. Not to mention a lot of opportunities for criminals to make a quick buck.

Cape Town’s Loop Taxi App is setting out to remove that taxi cash risk with a platform that helps commuters book a Loop (either as a public Loop Taxi along a specific route, or as a private Loop taxi – which is great as a shuttle-type service or staff transport), make instant payments (with no bank charges), and manage and cancel bookings, all via WhatsApp. 

Loop is currently available along the Vangate Mall, Bellville to Mitchell's Plain and Manenberg to Cape Town routes, with more routes being added monthly.

2. BEEN EVENTFUL

Make Event Planning a Breeze

It’s no secret that South Africa is fast becoming a top destination for corporate travel events and conferences. With world-class conference facilities, high-quality accommodation and bleisure opportunities like winelands tours, the Kruger Park, and lekker beach vibes, it’s unsurprising that SA’s MICE industry (Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, and Exhibitions) was valued at US$6.6 billion in 2023.

But coordinating different providers to make an event experience great is painful.

We recently stumbled across EventBookr, a local events marketplace connecting users with event services and providers across SA.

You can toggle across various categories to search for a provider, or use their free event planning wizard to start planning. Just a few key details: what event services you’re looking for, the city the event is being held in, and Bob’s your uncle. You’ve got suppliers you can shortlist and contact to get the ball rolling. 

3. BRAGGING RIGHTS

Earth’s Startup Training Ground?

South Africans are well within our (bragging) rights to be bullish on the local ecosystem. StartupBlink’s 2025 edition of its Startup Ecosystem Report puts us 52nd globally, and the Top African nation ahead of our friends Kenya (58th), Egypt (65th), Nigeria (66th) and Cape Verde.

And while Jozi might’ve just pipped The Mother City to the Top Cities post (122nd and 138th respectively), Cape Town is still considered one of Africa’s top startup destinations. Couple that with everything else Cape Town has to offer, and it becomes a great place to learn to startup.

Ollie Cape Town is a 5-month entrepreneur’s internship programme designed for international students to cut their entrepreneurial teeth at startups in Cape Town, matched to their specific skillsets. 

They get to live (with other Ollie students from that semester’s cohort) and work in the Mother City, get valuable real-world work experience, and university credits to top it all off. 

An African twist on the semester abroad — very nice.

Instagram post by @olliecapetown

4. BUILD IT

Waste Not, Want Not…

Africa faces a housing crisis, with more than 53 million units needed to house all its citizens. At the same time, the continent produces around 19 million tonnes of plastic waste (5% of global) annually.

And you know what’s coming next, right? Jip, a founder looked at that and said: How can we solve these problems, LEGO style…

Kubik is an Ethiopian startup repurposing hard-to-recycle plastic waste into affordable interlocking, low-carbon construction blocks that just snap together (no cement, water or steel needed).

They’re already recycling 5 tons of plastic waste per day, and their products have passed many of Intertek’s European safety tests for strength, toxicity and flammability (and more). Plus, it’s about 40% cheaper per square meter to build a house with Kubiks.

With a $5.2M seed round raised in 2024, Kubik is scaling production and eyeing new markets across Africa.

5. SUPPORT YOU NEED

Get in Early

The hardest part of building isn’t always the code… Getting something visual in front of people is pretty NB, too. Most early-stage teams, solo devs or founders have more ideas than time (or design skills).

Stitch (by Google) is an AI design tool built on Google’s Gemini models that helps create a UI for web or mobile projects – no designer needed.

You start by typing a prompt or uploading an image, Stitch then gets to work, confirming what you’re looking for, and it designs up a UI based on your prompts – a couple tweaks here and there, before you can export the designs it to Figma to make further changes, or export static HTML code to go straight to build.

While UI Designers are unlikely to be the next “victim of AI,” it’s a lekker tool for the early-stage founder’s belt.

IN SHORT

Fuel for Small Talk That Doesn’t Feel Small…

🌍 A Bot in Every Home. Africa’s largest smart metering solutions provider, Conlog, and local smart energy provider, Plentify, have joined forces to accelerate the rollout of intelligent energy management solutions to more than 50 million households across Africa. Nice one Jon & Team Plentify.

🎮 GameBuddy. Microsoft has rolled out a beta version of its Copilot for Gaming assistant to 54 countries, including South Africa and 5 other African countries. The assistant can answer questions and share info based on your games, account, and activity. We got a gaming AI assistant before GTA 6…

🇿🇦 Flying the Flag. Five South African startups are heading to London for the 9th Africa Tech Summit London, including logistics platform CtrlFleet, legal-tech service Lawyered Up, payments startup NjiaPay, recruitment service Rafiki, and waste management platform Smartfill. They’ll be up against 8 other African startups to pitch their offering to potential investors and partners on 6 June. Very nice.

🤳 A Pep in Your Step. 8 out of every 10 prepaid cellphones sold in South Africa are sold by the Pepkor Group of stores, including Pep and Ackermans, with 65% of those being affordable smartphones. The group’s newly added FoneYam smartphone rental product has also added more than 1.5 million customers. Staggering.

🛟 Breathing Room. The South African Reserve Bank announced a 25-basis-point cut to the benchmark repo rate, lowering it to 7.25%. The SARB governor, Lesetja Kganyago, also said that SA’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) considers a 3% scenario for inflation targeting going forward, more attractive than the 4.5% baseline and in line with global emerging economies. Hoping this is a step in the right direction to breathe some fire into the economy…

😎 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with all your tech recruitment streamlined and automated by Offerzen, zero-monthly-fee bank accounts and business loans in 4 minutes from Lula, plus loads more vital startup tools & services.

CHECK THIS OUT

Increase E-commerce Revenue? Leverage Your Payments Before Investing in More CAC

E-commerce Cart abandonment in SA averages 83.5%, well above the global rate of 70%.

Why?

• Payments failures

• Poor checkout UI/UX

• Wrong payment methods for the customers

This costs SA e-commerce businesses over R20 billion a year. A massive hit for SMEs who need to spend too much to attract customers, only to lose most of them at checkout.

That’s where NjiaPay comes in: They’re a payments-as-a-service partner that helps SMEs leverage payments as a way to convert more visits into sales.

How?

✅ One simple API connects you to ALL payment providers and methods (at once, you have every option available, so whichever option your visitor trusts, you have it)

✅ Creates a single, unified checkout process for every payment option imaginable

✅ NjiaPay routes each payment to the best-performing payment providers or the one with the lowest fee, so you and your customers always get the best deal.

SMEs get peace of mind knowing they’ve got all the tools in one place and a partner who’s got their back. Because payments shouldn’t just be a box you tick, they should power your growth.

Want to see where you’re losing revenue?

Take NjiaPay’s free payments benchmark analysis right now. We’ll review your current setup, conduct an in-depth analysis, and show you how to cut costs and boost conversion. Fill out the form, and we’ll be in touch to walk you through it.

DON’T MISS THIS

Coming Up in SA’s Most Vibrant Tech Founder Network

Next up in our members-only founder network — The Open Collab.

30 May 12:000 — Power of Storytelling Masterclass: Marketing, driving sales and attracting investment all boils down to your ability to craft and share stories — Jo Eyre from Voxeon gives SA startups the inside track.

6 June 12:000 — Dev Hiring Masterclass: The team from SA’s largest dataset and hiring platform, Offerzen, is here to share the latest in technical team hiring and trends.

13 June 12:00 — The Art of Strategy Masterclass: How high-growth founders think & win: Cut through complexity and create a scalable strategy for profitable growth with Jason Goldberg, Art of Scale author and co-founder of Edge Growth.

PLUS: When you join The Open Collab get access to expert sessions, more than 100 SA founders to network with and weekly online and offline network engagements.

JOBS IN TECH

Wanna build with the best in the biz?

You know how some startups talk a big game… and then some just quietly go and do it? 

Jem HR is one of those. They’re tackling one of the biggest blind spots in African work culture — building HR, payroll and benefits systems for SA’s 18 million deskless workers, where the users live: on WhatsApp.

Fresh from a R60m funding round and Top 10 Startup of the Year finalist, if you want to be part of a rising SA startup, you can join the team on the engineering side.

Keen on AI-first development? Join Jem as:

🏗️ Senior Product Engineer in Joburg 

🏄‍♂️ Senior Product Engineer in Cape Town

💪🏽 Personal Business Partner in Cape Town

GAME TIME

Riddle us this…

What is the Jozi-based platform helping young people land jobs, internships, and bursaries, all from their cellphones?

WHAT YOU SAID

Power to the peeps…

On Tuesday we asked about checking what your business pays for power, and we have the first 3-way tie in Open Letter history…

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🦉 We charge at night. Like energy vampires. (15.5%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 😬 Didn’t know time mattered. We just… plug in. (23%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 📊 We’ve got graphs, forecasts and a CFO who’s obsessed. (15.5%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🧾 Wait, there’s a cheaper time to use electricity? (23%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 💡 When the lights are on, we’re making money, so it doesn't really matter… (23%)

Your 2 cents…

That just happens to be our motto, Charmaine: read The Open Letter = get a little smarter. 💪

Ooh, can’t wait to welcome you, Andy — remember you can expense things like Open Collab to the company, so you don’t have to pay out of pocket (helpful if you’ve got an investor, too). 🤓

HOW DID WE DO?

BEFORE YOU GO

Here are 3 Ways We Can Help You

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

Grow with Content — Love The Open Letter? Want to build a newsletter just like that for your brand? Want to grow your brand with content? We can do it for you. Check out Stream.

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

Squad