Seen it {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? Something went wrong with our last edition from last week: The links might not have worked in the email you received. For this, we are very sorry. It was a special Heritage Day edition, so if you want to see all the SA startups that raised and exited, check them out here.

In This Open Letter

SA's got a massive waste problem and needs to start limiting organic waste (food and green, biodegradable waste) in the WC by 2027, nationally somewhere in the 2030s — but this team thinks flies can do the job for us…

Remember in March, we said a startup's teaching people to compost? Same problem: SA produces R61.5bn of food waste and spends R8.7bn a year covering it up, and it's especially bad in the Western Cape:

So what's the plan? Beyond making laws, not much. Composting is an obvious one, but not as clean a solution for companies to adopt at scale. It’s smart, though, using nature's solutions: things that eat trash. Bacteria are good, but so are flies — both happily break down organic matter.

That's why SA co-founders Elsje Pieterse and Brendes Gresse started building a black soldier fly-based solution by carting waste to a centralised processing facility near Sedgefield. But they, thankfully, learnt from past lessons that fly-farming at scale can be risky business…

So Elsje, Brendes and team created a much more elegant, on-site solution instead…

The local outfit rebuilding fly farming one small box at a time

Amesect is a Stellenbosch company that ships a specially designed two-metre cube (about the size of a garden shed) called a Micro MAGIC³ to breweries, restaurants, eco-resorts, poultry- and food processors to act as the new "bin". Inside are black soldier fly larvae that turn organic waste into fertiliser.

The clever part, Director of Strategy and Business Development Dave Stewart tells us, is in the design: the size of the box and the number of larvae inside are optimised to use the little wrigglers' body heat to create the microclimate needed for efficient breakdown.

Their first commercial unit has been running for over a year at a high-end eco-reserve near Gansbaai, where they use the larvae to sommer feed the reserve's chickens and the fertiliser (insect frass) to grow lekker veggies, but the monetisation plan is for Amesect to collect the larvae and turn them into lab-validated chitosan in medicines, and larval oils rich in lauric acid for cosmetics.

The world is already taking notice: In May, Amesect landed on Bloomberg's 2026 Africa Startups to Watch list, one of only four South African names on it.

We're watching this space…

In 2013, Stripe and Shopify built a checkout together to kill the redirect, and it worked better than anyone predicted. Shopify Payments now handles 64% of everything sold on the platform, processed $67 billion in a single quarter, and stores that moved onto it have reported conversion lifts of 50—70%.

South Africa never got it. Shopify Payments doesn't operate here, so our stores were left with the bolt-on gateway and the trip to a third-party page that slowly kills e-commerce.

Paystack, Stripe's African arm, has now closed that gap: Paystack Onsite is South Africa's first onsite card checkout for Shopify:

Local agencies are already seeing it land: Mario Tuscano, Managing Director at AskMario, says some clients have seen "an increase in conversion of up to 15% just from this feature alone."

It’s 13 years late, but it's finally here, SA.

☀️ Joburg's R518m Township Solar Bet. City Power's putting solar microgrids into 5 informal settlements to try beat illegal connections. The catch? At one site, illegal connections are degrading it. Good idea, but who actually makes sure people get connected properly? They’re also not making power cheaper for anyone else.

📞 Gemini Will Hold So You Don't Have To. Google's testing an AI that phones businesses from your number, sits on hold and books the thing. Sci-fi dreams, sorted, but what happens to all the smaller SaaS startups building the same thing?

🚛 Two EV Trucks, 4'000km, No Excuses. A 35-tonne electric rig is running SA's main freight routes with independent data logging to see if SA is ready for big EV rollouts. The lekker bit: freight sorts out the charging so we citizens can go electric later.

💬 Sales, Not Spam. Poetry already had the brand and the audience. So Chat Inc turned WhatsApp into a high-conversion sales channel that pulled in 14.8k shoppers to generate R1.58 million in revenue at 269% ROI. Ask them to do the same for you.*

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

Hardware eats cash, the SA EV market barely exists yet, and most funding advice is written for software. So we asked an SA founder who navigated all three to around R50m raised what he learned while building.

These are the 5 lessons from building a hardware EV business in SA worth stealing, whatever you're building.

Bitcoin hit an 8-month high and analysts are calling the winter over. BTC touched $87'265 on Wednesday before easing to around $84'000, a 30% run since late August. And Binance's OTC desk explains why this recovery is real: it's driven by institutional flows, not hype.

A R5m fine over R301 of trades. Africa Bitcoin Corporation's founder Warren Wheatley has been debarred for 20 years by the FSCA. He says it was three test trades worth R301 that cost him everything, even resigning as CEO.

Crypto is SA's 5th era of money. Cattle, then coins, then cards, then mobile banking. Binance Africa's Larry Cooke reckons crypto is the next chapter, and it deserves the same patience the others got.

Disclaimer: Digital asset prices can be volatile. The value of your investment may go down or up and you may not get back the amount invested. You are solely responsible for your investment decisions and Binance is not liable for any losses you may incur. Not financial advice. For more information, see our Terms of Use and Risk Warning.

Fine Dining with Linda Reddy, 1 Oct, Sandton: Nando's global exec on the unspoken rules of getting ahead in corporate, over dinner at Hotel Sky. Get tickets.

Tourism Tech Talk, 6 Oct, Stellenbosch: Half-day on AI, automation and customer data for tourism businesses, with NightsBridge, CTICC and Big Ambitions at the SU LaunchLab. Free, 40 seats. Register here.

Optimising Operations in Notion with AI, 27 Oct, CPT: A live Notion and AI build session for ops people, at BBD in Century City. Join here.

Powered by Radi. Want your business event in front of 36,000 The Open Letter readers? Host it on Radi, and it lands here.

🧩 Tool to Try: MyIntelBrief spies on your competitors for you.

🐌 That's Interesting: In 1846, a presumed-dead snail was glued to an index card at the British Museum as a display specimen. Four years later, it was still alive. The museum bathed it, and it lived out its remaining two years in a jar eating cabbage.