AI camo {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? Out of the entire Open Letter crew, we think only Jason could pull off the Hawaiian shirt look. And it's important, because a German designer just created the world's ugliest Hawaiian shirt for one reason: It makes you undetectable to AI surveillance cameras. 👕
In This Open Letter
The Trend: A band to help save miners' lives.
Local: Wits does it again & Fidelity eyes the JSE.
Global: AI helped run a world-first brain surgery.
Next in Crypto: BTC hits a wall & the institutions hold.
Tech events: LeaderEx, biotech stories & a coffee rave.
Work Smarter: Who should you try and sell to?
🛠️ Need a hand growing your business?
The Founder Stack is full of local companies providing the tools and services you need. At SA prices, in SA business hours. Pick up the phone and actually speak to them.
TRENDING NOW
A band to help save miners' lives
Many miners wake up at 2 AM, travel 90 minutes to site and head underground on maybe 5 hours' sleep — so this Klerksdorp venture programmed a smart wristband to try keep 'em safe…
Obvs mining is a big part of SA's economy. And SA mining spent 3 decades improving its safety record: Going from 484 fatalities per year circa 1994 to a record-low 41 in 2025. Mooi.
But collapsing tunnel deaths rose 25% last year, and some international studies suggest operator/worker fatigue could play a big part in this, as 45% of workers usually get under six hours of sleep before a shift. There's proof of it overseas:
In Ghanaian gold mines, fatigue is connected to more than half of all accidents.
In Australia, where human error causes roughly nine in ten mine accidents, 60-70% traces back to fatigue.
We can’t help imagining they’re fatigued ‘cos they up playing Minecraft all night… (jk)
But mines have a unique problem
Obvs tech can help monitor workers' vitals, but most use feature phones (dumb), cos' there's no signal underground anyway. So one mine in the North West Province went looking for someone that might have a solution.
And they ended up talking to founders Jaap Coetzer and Henno Bakker, who run DankoSpark, a software house in Klerksdorp, and just so happened to find themselves with a few extra hours per day ('cos AI's helped kill the need for 24-hour marathon coding days).
They had one question: How do you monitor worker fatigue without a R20k device on every wrist? The answer was a screenless wristband for which the two happened to be official suppliers in SA…
The local platform putting a number on a miner's exhaustion
The DankoSpark team is building a custom Fatigue Management Platform that tracks how miners sleep, their heart rate and recovery using that screenless Polar 360 band.
A sync station in the lamp room (where miners hang their headlamps) pulls the data off each miner's band to as far back as its last sync, and sends each miner a weekly SMS link to a light PDF in his own language (one of seven, Fanagalo included), with AI feedback on how he's sleeping and recovering.
The mine's medical staff get the other side: an exceptions dashboard that flags the outliers (low recovery 3 nights running, high exertion, etc.). And Jaap says the unions quite like the idea of using tech to improve miners' health, so they're actively supporting the project.
The platform at a glance
Pilot live at 5 sites for one mining company (a few hundred devices in the field).
Currently working with a network to zero-rate the report link, so it costs the miner nothing to open.
We like that they're building it out in a niche where it's clearly needed (no signal underground), but we can't help noting that this could work for outdoorsy jobs everywhere.
We're watching this space…
IN SHORT
While you were weekending…
🔬 Another Wits Communication Breakthrough. Four weeks after their quantum result, the same lab fired data across 270m of open Joburg air. And the new tech might just kill the most expensive line item in free-space optics.
🛡️ Fidelity Wants the JSE. 71'000 staff, 300 locations, guards outnumbering cops four to one. Local security firm Fidelity says they’re listing on the JSE and taking their business from SA to the world.
🧠 AI Just Helped Do Brain Surgery. Surgeons successfully pulled an 11mm tumour out of a man’s head with the help of an AI for the first time. The trick was not wanting the AI to do all the work, but instead just having it read the live feed and flagging what not to cut.
🔋 A New Fully Electric Bakkie. Geely launched a brand-new, all-electric bakkie that can tow 3 tons and serve as a backup generator for your site or house. It could also be a lekker fleet option, priced, reportedly, at around R611'900. Hmm…
📬 Audience Owned. Most B2B founders know they should be running a newsletter, but never get it off the ground. The Newsletter Co ghostwrites, compiles and sends it for you, with 42% average open rates, 40k+ subscribers reached, live in 2 weeks.*
* From our partners. Find all the best service providers for your business in our Founder Stack.
WORK SMARTER
Who will actually buy your startup?
If you're building a startup towards an exit, there are only four realistic types of buyer, and each one pays for something completely different. We asked one of SA's longest-serving venture capitalists to map them out…
And there are 5 specific checks to work out who could buy your startup (and how much they'll pay).
NEXT IN CRYPTO
3 Things in crypto this week
Bitcoin ran into a wall on Friday. BTC touched $81'142 on 28 August, its highest since mid-May, then reversed to about $77'800. The week still closed roughly flat, so it remains to be seen what it does in September after the August rally.
Crypto’s institutional bids are holding up. Spot bitcoin ETFs pulled in $1.13bn between Monday and Thursday, with BlackRock's IBIT taking most of it, a second straight week of real inflows after eight months of one-good-week-then-redemptions.
Tokenised securities are exploding. A new Delphi report says bStocks scaled faster than any rival, $14.7bn in volume by month two. And Binance brought the story home with a women's crypto workshop in Cape Town.
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.
Binance proudly sponsors Next in Crypto.
Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, connects South Africans to the future of digital finance, trusted by 300+ million users, backed by global compliance, industry-leading security, and global community impact.
WHAT YOU SAID
Two tomatoes and a dream…
Last week, we showed you the Divisi farming app, asking how green your thumb really is. The verdict? Mostly aspirational…
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🪦 I've killed every plant I've ever owned (21%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🍅 Two tomatoes and I call myself a farmer (61%)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🚜 Full veggie patch, basically self-sufficient (18%)
Your 2 cents…
"I would love to be a backyard farmer, but lack knowledge and skill (and time and energy)"
Sounds like exactly what Divisi was built for, Mara. 🌱
LOOKING TO NETWORK?
Upcoming SA Tech Events
Tech Summit at LeaderEx, 1 Sep, Sandton: Founders, funders and the people writing the cheques, with Jason and Renier hosting. Get in free with our code.
Startup Stories: Bionuclex Research, 2 Sep, CPT: The team chasing multi-cancer early detection from a single blood draw, over lunch. Get tickets.
Coffee Rave @Innovation City, 3 Sep, CPT: Founders, creatives and tech people over brews and beats to open the spring season. Register free.
Powered by Radi. Want your business event in front of 36,000 The Open Letter readers? Host it on Radi, and it lands here.
AROUND THE WEB
Blow off some steam…
🧩 Tool to Try: BetterStay alerts you when better Airbnb listings open up for your dates.
🍎 That's Interesting: Apple seeds rarely grow the same variety as the parent fruit. Nearly every supermarket apple comes from a grafted clone of an original tree, not from a planted seed.
