Point and shoot {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? Scientists used human brain cells to build a biological computer chip so they could teach it to play the first-person shooter DOOM. Because why not? 🔫

In This Open Letter

Almost R350bn’s 60, 90, 120-day late payments are killing SA small businesses – but this SA venture seeks to get them paid pronto…

SA businesses are being held hostage… Not by criminal syndicates or by the government, but late payments – 91% of SMEs are experiencing this. 

And consequences are dire: Owners of SA’s 3.5 million SMEs are on average owed nearly R100k in late payments at any one time, spending entire work days chasing payments as 25% of business failures are now directly linked to non-payments.

Sheesh, that’s R349.3 billion in late payments flying around SA every day as the 30-day payment term gets stretched to 60-90 or even 120 days for some corporates and government entities. Naughty, naughty.

The polite path to bankruptcy

See, most SMEs don’t have a debt guy. Just a spreadsheet and increasingly awkward emails, until 90 days in, when most give up and lose out on hard-earned revenue. 

Why? Collecting debt in SA is highly complex due to a combination of an inefficient, multi-layered court system and a general lack of effective enforcement tools, making legal action both expensive and time-consuming for businesses. 

The vast majority of SMEs cannot resort to professional debt collection, effectively writing off monies owed once it reaches the 90-to-120-day mark.

The local venture putting debt collection within everyone’s reach

Adebt is a success-based recovery platform that connects SMEs with a network of registered debt collectors to recover overdue invoices.

You upload an invoice, and the platform cycles it through up to three different collectors to find the one that sticks. The founder gets to choose the intensity of the debt pursuit, balancing the need to get paid with the desire to keep the client relationship intact.

The best part: If Adebt’s collectors don’t collect, you don’t pay – an attractive option for SMEs.

We caught up with Adebt founder Luke Romyn recently, and he shared how he observed his father run a traditional debt business for years, realising that different collectors have different trade secrets and mechanisms.

They built an MVP of the initial platform to sense check before fully committing to engineering and, with nearly R350 billion locked in non-paying hands, hope to use it to tweak SA’s debt collection formula enough to give the little guy a shot – and inject some liquidity back into the ecosystem.

We’ll break down the full TAM and opportunity signal on this one in Friday’s Brief.

Google’s secret free coding tool. Google’s Gemini CLI is helping tech teams push out hundreds of features per month — a free, Claude Code–style tool built for serious shipping. Check it out.

R40k+ in real founder perks. Did you know you get R40k’s worth of business tools and services for free when you join The Founder Collab? From free cloud support, legal help, tech vetting, to data, plus 40+ hours of practical growth playbooks. See what you get.

Find what’s really slowing you down. ClarityOS helps teams uncover what’s killing their momentum. A quick diagnostic quiz uncovers hidden blockers, then generates tailored action plans and follow-ups. Try it here.

Attio's AI handles my morning prep — surfacing insights from calls, updating records without manual entry, and answering pipeline questions in seconds. No searching, no switching tabs, no manual updates.

Start now →

🏦 SA Bank Back Up For Grabs. Bidvest Bank is back on the market after the deal with Nigerian lender, Access Bank, fell through due to Access Bank failing to secure the required approvals. Who’s looking?

🌽 Operator Insights. 63.5% of SA experiences food insecurity & high prices. Yet small-scale farmers outnumber commercial operations 60 to 1. Why are their goods not reaching formal markets? Here’s what’s really going on in farming in South Africa.

🗼Helleo There. Vodacom’s parent company Vodafone, has signed a new deal with low-Earth-orbit satellite network Amazon Leo. The deal will see Vodafone use Leo to connect mobile base stations in Europe before rolling it out across Africa through Vodacom. Very interesting.

👕 Get a Wardrobe Change asap! Fashion is coming to your doorstep with Pick n Pay Clothing products just being added to its on-demand delivery app, asap! Orders will be dispatched from a dark store in Jozi and are delivered nationwide within 3 to 5 working days.

💡 SMEs No Longer Flying Blind. If you’re running a business without financial direction, you’re taking unnecessary risks. Finvoke gives founders on-demand CFO support — strategic, tax-smart and priced for SMEs.*

* From our partners. Find all the best service providers for your business in our Founder Stack.

Yesterday, we showed you Flyte's proper transport management, asking about the hardest part of digitising an old-school industry. Most say it’s the old habits…

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📉 Shaking off the spreadsheet legacy (16%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💸 Managing months-long cash flow gap (12%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📄 Dealing with physical paper requirements (7%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤝 Building trust in a handshake culture (7%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🧠 The "That's just how we've always done it" mindset (58%)

Your 2 cents…

Love that energy, Lize! Even if they don’t listen just yet, keep planting those seeds! 🌱🚀

On 3 March 1971, Texan tech company Magnavox got the license to sell the world’s first home TV game console, the Odyssey. The first game on it was Table Tennis (which would inspire Pong).

It wasn’t developed by some forward-thinking tech corporation, though. The console was the weekend project of a group of engineers at a major US defence contractor at the time.

🧠 Tool to Try: BehaviorCam analyses body language in real time using AI.

🔔 That’s Interesting: In 2018, India and Pakistan were briefly caught in a diplomatic spat over allegations that diplomats were ringing each other’s doorbells at 3am and running away.

🍫 Next Level: Watch a pastry chef sculpt a hyper-realistic leopard out of chocolate.

☢️ Hack: A clean visual ranking of nuclear power generation by country.

🧱 Wow Site: Wall Of The Internet lets you see anonymous messages by others and post some yourself.