Too many {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? Jason was again complaining about the lack of robots in this week's editions, so we got him a clip of a bunch of glitched delivery robots swarming in one spot. Elvorne thinks they're nesting; Renier says they're looking for the bathroom. You?

In Today's Open Letter

South Africans spend the 3rd most time on social media in the world, yet 65% feel lonely and more disconnected than ever — this local startup knows why, and they've got a solution…

The WHO now links loneliness to roughly 100 deaths every hour, and its link to digital media is not a mystery: studies found that social media use correlates with increased depression and anxiety, while compulsive scrollers aged 9+ become 2—3 times more likely to report suicidal thoughts or behaviour.

Probs 'cos you get so focused on what (let's be honest) strangers are saying that you forget to message the one friend whose birthday it actually is.

A happy meeting

Adam Pantanowitz wanted to create a corner of the internet safe enough to post his kids' faces in. So he started work on something with advisor Warren Myers.

What he didn’t know at the time is that, earlier this year, producer Savannah Boltman had burned out hard, landed in hospital, and dropped offline for three months. And when she came back online, almost none of her friends had even noticed she was gone. They'd stopped seeing her on Instagram, so they'd stopped seeing her at all.

She’d lived the problem personally, and, by a twist of fate, Adam’s platform froze mid-presentation at an event Savannah had organised. She stepped in to run the room, but felt such a connection to the idea that, a short while later, they joined forces with her as co-founder and CEO to rebuild, rebrand and take the idea to the next level…

The app that shows you which friendships are dying

Closerr is an app to deepen relationships with the 15 people (not 500) you can't afford to lose touch with. Open it, and your closest people appear as a small universe orbiting you. The longer you go without contact, the further each one drifts.

It takes the invisible thing (a real friendship going quiet) and puts it right in front of you:

We like that it's privacy-first in a market that has stopped trusting feeds: no ads, no algorithm, no data harvesting and it was built by someone who lived the exact problem it solves.

We're watching this space…

GPT-6 Astra just aced the world's most brutal exam. A perfect 450 on South Korea's 8-hour CSAT. But the feature you'll actually use is Writing Styles: it reads your Gmail and Slack, learns how you write, then writes as you. See it here.

Fable 5.1 works while you're gone. Claude's newest release takes one prompt and runs complex, multi-day work off it. This is the one you point at a week of digging through codebases or monitoring, then leave alone instead of checking in every five minutes. Try it here.

Your fridge is technically an AI agent. Praelexis says every agent runs the same four movements: sense, comprehend, act, reflect. Your fridge manages two. And reflection is exactly where most production agents quietly fall over. Read it here.

Despite it all, Isaac's product has great traction, and he's building for the real world, offline, with us at The Founder Collab: where SA founders gather to find their people, with weekly accountability, honest feedback, and a room full of peers who want to help and see your business succeed. If you're building in SA, come join us.

🏦 Changes in SA’s Payment Space. The banks no longer govern SA's payment system. PASA's recognition lapsed on 2 September, splitting everything between the Reserve Bank and PayInc, which the banks still half-own. Baby steps, né.

🤖 BYO Agent to Work. Shoprite's CTO says new recruits may soon pitch up with their own AI agents; he's already asked HR whether a token allowance belongs in a salary package. About 12'000 staff are already on their in-house AI.

🚗 Weaponising a Tesla. An Australian man was sent to prison for using a Tesla app to torment his ex, locking her out on certain days, swinging the aircon from boiling to freezing, capping her speed. Every connected product has this hole. Goeiste.

🎓 EdTech Moves. Injini opened applications for an AI for Education venture builder: 12 teams, eight months, $25'000 equity-free for the top five. Catch: you must apply as a full team, classroom experience included. Closes 27 September.

📊 Books Sorted. Spreadsheets don't scale. Xero runs invoicing, bank reconciliation, VAT, expenses and reporting from one cloud dashboard, with direct feeds into FNB, Absa, Standard Bank and Nedbank. TOL readers get 90% off for the first 6 months.*

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

Founders are excellent at solving things manually: You build the workaround, you absorb the admin, you accept the friction and, after a while, it stops registering as a problem at all. It is just how your business works.

Then someone mentions there is an entire industry for it, and you realise you have been doing something by hand for two years that a local company does for a small monthly fee that’s cheaper per hour than the money you lose spending your own time on it.

Checking the Founder Stack top to bottom is a useful exercise for exactly this reason. Not because you need everything on it, but because you find out what exists. And if someone does it cheaper than it costs you to spend time on it, that's obvs a sound business solution.

Yesterday, we showed you what it takes to grow the township economy, asking how your last compliance application went. Most here are still waiting, six forms later…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 😤 Still waiting, six forms later (45%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 💸 Paid someone else to suffer (33%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🧘 Done in an afternoon, no drama (22%)

Your banking app is where the fraud happens, but it rarely starts there…

💡 SA digital banking fraud climbed 13% in 2025, with losses climbing to R2.4bn.

💡 But while most fraud happens on banking apps (~9'000 a month), losses per case sit around R17'389. Internet banking fraud (~1’300 a month) is by far the most expensive, with losses of R73'582 per case.

💡 Mobile banking is the cheapest and rarest, despite seeing the most SIM swap incidents.

SABRIC is blunt that the apps usually aren't the weak link. The fraud starts outside the platform, with AI-generated phishing and someone impersonating a trusted institution, then walking your customer through the transaction in real time. Very scary.

Thrive Under 25, 1 Oct, Cape Town: Three founders building real businesses before 25, moderated by Kieno Kammies at Innovation City. R50. Get tickets.

Founders Café, 10 Oct, Cape Town: A half-day founder morning at Flower Café, 50 seats, micro-talks and a R4'000 gift bag. R1'500. Get tickets.

Cocktails & Capital: Backing the Backers, 22 Oct, Cape Town: Why LPs and family offices back venture funds rather than startups directly. From R50, apply to attend. Apply 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: RadioMap24, an interactive world map for discovering and playing radio stations and podcasts from anywhere on Earth.

🐷 That's Interesting: In China, there's a 26-storey pig farm that processes a million hogs a year. Jip, it’s a skyscraper for pigs.