A little chilly {{ FIRSTNAME }}? A startup helped an old UK couple cut their heating costs by 90% by replacing their heaters with a mini data centre in their garden shed. 🧠

In This Open Letter

Finding a good bursary in SA is an absolute minefield – so this early-stage startup’s automating it…

Of the 600k South African annual matriculates, only about half will join the 2.2 million currently studying at universities, colleges or in SETA training programmes. Mainly because there just isn’t space for everyone.

Not great for our troubling unemployment rate, as graduates are twice as likely to get a good job in SA (90% of our unemployed have matric or below, while only 2% of graduates are unemployed).

SA obviously needs to get more people a better education – 37% of SA 15–24 year olds are classed as NEET by StatsSA (Not in Employment, Education or Training).

Why? Affordability: a university degree is R48k–R100k per year and SA’s median salary (i.e. the parent that has to pay for it) is only R5’417 per month – those two things ☝ shall never meet. 

And you can’t really ask more of taxpayers: R2 out of every 10 tax Rands already goes toward education and bursaries. There is no more.

So what if you could just streamline who gets access to existing bursaries?

A huge need

Government’s bursary scheme, NSFAS, funds about 500k of its annual 2 million funding applications (a quarter), meaning you probs have a 1 in 4 chance of qualifying for one.

At least, that’s what now-Stellenbosch student Iyaaz Kato thought in his gap year… Until he started looking for bursaries, quickly realising it’s an absolute hot mess trying to find one in SA.

Iyaaz spent a literal year trying to navigate a minefield of outdated websites, forms and endless strings of emails before realising that it’s a blooming miracle anyone has ever managed to survive the hoops and red tape needed to qualify for a bursary in this country.

So, as soon as he landed his spot at Stellies, he built a tool to make it way faster and easier…

The AI that helps you pay

unipage is an AI-driven web app that automates the process of finding suitable bursaries and degree programmes, starting with students creating a unique profile.

Then AI agents go and search bursary sites and university information from all of SA’s 26 universities, cross-check eligibility against your marks and interests, presenting you with a short list of options that are an actual academic fit in a fraction of the time it would have taken to find manually.

Next, their built-in “Papa AI” guides students (in a fun and quirky tone) in preparing their applications to give them the maximum chance of success.

It’s still early days for unipage, but getting more suitable teenagers from report card to a funded is a win in our books. 

We’re watching this space.

Fund now, pay later. Lula’s November offer lets you unlock funding today and only start repaying at the end of Jan ’26 — use code GROW2025. Apply here.

E-commerce founders take note: Google’s new checkout AI, promoted to end-consumers already, can call stores, auto-buy when prices drop and chat through 50 billion listings. We could see a future where your store needs to be agent-ready to capitalise. Get details here.

Try agents without the risk. Mixus adds a human-approval layer before AI agents send emails or take actions, so founders can automate confidently without fear of costly mistakes. Try it here.

Imagine you’re building a house. You’re rushing to paint the walls before you’ve even laid the foundation. Weird, right? Yet we see it all the time in data and AI projects. Dashboards up, metrics lit, big visuals… but the plumbing’s leaking and the wiring’s half-done. 

At Sidekick Lab we believe the boring stuff matters: cataloguing what data exists, tagging it, lining up relationships, documenting origins, cleaning up duplications, that’s the foundation. 

When the foundation is solid, everything above becomes stable, predictable and scalable. Because once your data landscape is organised, you can hit refresh on strategy, expand analytics, add new channels, and bring AI in without chaos. 

If you skip the messy groundwork, you’ll be firefighting later. Spend time now getting the logistics right. Build strong. Then the finish line’s not a scramble: it’s a launchpad.

🏡 Closer to Home. The Shoprite Group has built a bespoke jobs portal that matches applicants with a vacancy at a store closest to their home in a bid to provide job seekers with shorter commutes. Very cool.

🚖 Get on the List. The Gauteng Department of Roads and Transport is urging e-hailing companies in the province to register their apps in a move to formalise this “new” transport category. Interesting.

🤖 Meta’s KP(A)I. From next year, Meta employees will be evaluated on performance that includes their use of AI on the job as the tech giant continues on its journey of having an AI-native culture. Makes sense given their boss might be an AI…

📮 Bringing it Back. The South African Post Office could be revived thanks to the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies on the hunt for strategic partnerships with both private and public entities. Seems like it’s starting with an MVNO…

✅ The Stack. Founders need reliable tools, so our Founder’s Stack gives you real-time AI insights from Sidekick Lab, zero-monthly-fee bank accounts and business loans from Lula and more.

Every time you share, you get something cool in return.

Yesterday, we showed you how PrivySeal is building digital qualification validation tech, asking about the worst lie you’ve seen to land a gig. For most, it’s the solo with the “CEO” title…

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🖼️ Saw someone land a job with a fake portfolio (21%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 😎 “CEO”, but it’s basically just them doing everything (54%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤷 Based on performance, guessing my boss faked their whole career (21%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🧑‍⚕️ I might not be a Dr, but I sure know how to operate (4%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🧑‍⚖️That only happens on TV, right? (0)

On 18 November 1963, Bell Telephone, the company founded by the original phone inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, 86 years earlier in 1877, introduced the first electronic push-button phone.

Before that, most phones were analogue, using a rotary dial system.

🔍 Tool to Try: MyLens turns any YouTube video into a clickable timeline of key moments.

💰 That’s Interesting: A $500 storage unit on the TV show “Storage Wars” once contained $7.5 million in cash. After the show, the original owners wanted it back, paying $1.2 million to the man who’d bought it.

🐦 Next Level: A raven plays tic-tac-toe and even knows when it’s won.

🧩 Hack: Time-blocking your day by broader roles like “parent,” “employee,” “founder,” etc., can help you switch hats instead of juggling chaos.

🤖 Wow Site: Glorp is the funniest homemade chatbot we’ve had the misfortune of coming across.

We are always keen to get reader feedback to help make The Open Letter the most useful of its kind for you. So please select