Hold onto your phone {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? New research shows that globally, mobile phone sales have dropped to a 14-year low (below 2012 levels). The main reason? Increased prices due to the memory shortage. 🤯

In Today’s Open Letter

When we first featured AirOffices in Mar '25, they had about three Vida e Caffè stores live – now, they're in 30+ venues and growing 10% every month…

Just 19 months ago, Brendan Lock was building a way to book the quiet rooms inside popular coffee shops that nobody could book. Now, AirOffices lists 30+ venues across 8+ countries, including:

Rooms cost R80–R350 an hour, and the platform has ~1'400 users, ~68% of them companies, and it's growing 10% month-on-month.

Who's booking? Mostly teams that meet 2–3 times a week: lawyers, engineering consultants, media teams and more — those who still want to gather.

Why AirOffices are better than just plain noisy coffee shops…

The 3 big lessons Brendan took from building

1. Grow on someone else's traction: Nobody knows AirOffices, but everyone knows Vida, so working for and with them unlocks the venues, which brings the customers.

2. Fix the friction before chasing the marketplace: Venues used to take bookings by email. Brendan says the 10x jump came from replacing a bad system, not from being brilliant.

3. A booking engine alone isn't sticky anymore: Any venue could build one with AI now, so the next phase is about integrations that make AirOffices harder to replace.

What's next for AirOffices

They're in talks with a UK co-working software company to let spaces run member and public bookings on one calendar and are looking into single-person pods in places like hospitals (user research found 24 kinds of people who'd pay for an hour), and have already onboarded a boardroom at Cape Gate Medical Centre.

Just imagine: somewhere in a coffee shop in Douglasdale, four people are having the same meeting your company signed a lease for. And the coffee's probably better too.

We're watching this space…

Claude's dashboards now come with the explainer video. Claude Dashboards turns plain-language questions into live dashboards on Snowflake, BigQuery or Databricks, and Claude Motion turns the results into an editable MP4 explainer. Both are in beta on paid plans. See how it works.

Can AI spot breast cancer risk from scans you've already had? NYU Langone built an AI that reads a woman's past mammograms together, and it beat today's risk method across 161'000 women. Still a research tool, but no extra appointments needed. Read more.

Your AI launched, so why is nobody using it? Praelexis says deployment isn’t adoption: a working model often ends up ignored six months later. The fix is rolling it out team by team, listening first, and checking weekly whether people still use it. Read it here.

Your stock moves through multiple stages on its journey from origin to customer. When those stages are connected, businesses gain greater visibility and control across the journey.

Takealot Fulfilment Solutions (TFS) brings together logistics capability across warehousing, fulfilment and delivery, supported by a national network that includes:

Real-time tracking and technology integrations provide greater visibility into the movement of goods, helping businesses stay informed across the journey and deliver a consistent customer experience.

Whether you ship a hundred orders a month or tens of thousands, TFS has the operational experience and network capability to scale as your business grows.

One partner. Connected capability. Built to move.

💰 Early Backers Cash Out. Lending-tech startup Kuunda just completed a R85m secondary share sale, letting its earliest investors take money off the table without a listing or a sale. It's their second one. In SA venture, that's a rare win.

🚀 R5.4bn for Founders. Endeavor Catalyst just closed an oversubscribed R5.4bn fifth fund to co-invest alongside big rounds led by others. The catch: you have to be an Endeavor entrepreneur first. The network is the doorway.

🤖 AI Companions, Bankrupt. Character AI has filed for bankruptcy after a wave of lawsuits over harm to teens, with Disney offering R338m to license some of its IP. A big, engaged user base didn't save it once the legal bills arrived.

🔓 Ampath Hacked. Ampath Laboratories has confirmed a cyberattack, with hackers claiming 80 million records: ID numbers, contact details and medical aid info. Expect convincing scam calls. Hang up and call back on a number you know.

💸 Faster VC Deals. Why does preparing funding deals take so much longer in SA? Well, the US and UK are speeding it up with templated processes. So Dommisse Attorneys and SAVCA created SA's first open-source model investment documents — see more here.*

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

Come build with Brendan and founders like him. The Founder Collab is where SA founders find their people, with weekly accountability, honest feedback, and people who've been where you are.

Yesterday, we showed you Mindjoy’s STEM education platform, asking about your relationship with high-school maths. Most here loved it, and still do…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 📐 Loved it, still do (55%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 😮‍💨 Survived it, barely (31%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🫣 I'd have been cooked without a calculator (14%)

Your 2 cents…

Ha ha, arguing 6.5% up to 7% is real-world maths, and also a negotiation skill most founders pay to learn, Siboniso. 🧮🤝

Price matters most to 7 in 10 SA car shoppers, but first-time buyers lean on looks.

💡 70.8% of shoppers named price as one of their top three factors, and it stays number one for first-time and seasoned buyers alike.

💡 First-time buyers pick on design more often: 12%, against 8.9% of multi-car owners.

💡 Experienced owners think about living with the car. Fuel efficiency (57.6% vs 49.3%), safety ratings (25.8% vs 18%) and practicality (12.4% vs 4%) all climb.

For dealers, the message is simple: affordability sells, and the second car is bought on running costs.

⚡ Next Level: Someone caught ultra-rare red sprite lightning on video in Tibet, high above the storm clouds, where excited nitrogen glows red.

🍸 Wow Site: Licence to Locate is an interactive atlas of every James Bond filming location.