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Remember the Jetsons? One Slovakian startup says they’ll launch the world’s first commercially available flying car by next year — check it out. Still needs to get approvals, but they’re confident it’ll pass and be available for order by 2026. 🚀

SA spends R53 billion per year on fresh produce, but 50% of that is transport costs – meet the startup helping consumers save those costs and get 40x more nutritious food…

Nearly 40% of SA’s total land area (46.4M out of 122.5M hectares) is dedicated to commercial agriculture… But it’s spread across the Northern Cape (37,1%), Free State (16,4%), Eastern Cape (12,3%), and the North West province (11,5%), so your fresh veggies and salad need to travel several hundred kilometres to your plate.

And since we transport 75% of SA’s agricultural produce by road, about 30–50% of the margin gets swallowed up by logistics costs (depending on crop, season, and route).

The opportunity

Beyond the transport costs, farmland is also shrinking: We’ve written about the annual loss of 100 million hectares of healthy and productive farmland globally. So we’ve got ourselves a bit of a conundrum.

In a world where we can stream global news in milliseconds, why is growing food still stuck in the Stone Age? Maybe it’s time to reframe the food security problem as a logistics issue…

Who’s solving the problem

Remember when we told you about vertical farming startup Arable’s farm-in-a-box solution (already supplying local restaurants with fresh produce)? Well, Arable has just launched Sprout: the desktop hydroponic grower that’s turning small spaces into self-sufficient gardens for a cool R3,699.

Originally built as a teaching aid in vertical farming in classrooms, Sprout lets you grow and harvest your own nutrient-dense microgreens (with 40x vitamins and antioxidants) in just 2 weeks.

A system of energy-efficient LEDs, a quiet fan, and sleek water system lets you grow your own mini broccoli, red cabbage, rocket basil, and more right on your kitchen countertop. Pretty cool.

Opportunities in AI? Meta reportedly poached four researchers from OpenAI, offering sports-star-level bonuses to the tune of $100M. It’s a clear signal that the AI talent wars are heating up, and the real frontier is model performance, not marketing.

Customer support team ballooning? Swedish FinTech Klarna’s AI assistant now handles two-thirds of all service chats — that’s the work of 700 full-time agents — across 23 countries in 35+ languages. It’s faster, more accurate and slashed repeat queries by 25%. That’s what AI ops at scale looks like. Read more here.

Think building an AI agent is complex? Digital growth hacker Grace Leung says not so: Her new tutorial shows you how to spin up a full team of AI assistants — from research to visuals to management — in under 30 minutes. It’s simple, scalable, and doesn’t need a line of code. Watch the guide.

“Our product lags. Clients complain. We’re not sure where it’s breaking.”

If performance is holding you back — outages, latency, sluggish infrastructure — you’re not alone. Most early-stage SaaS teams are duct-taping infra together until something breaks.

But here’s the truth: if your product isn’t fast, it won’t grow.

Cloud On Demand’s ISV program offers a free cloud architecture review for South African SaaS companies running on Azure.

Their engineers will:

No fluff. No obligation. Just help from actual humans who’ve built this before.

You could hire a CTO or cloud architect and wait six weeks. Or you could book a free session and get real answers this week.

July is your window — fix performance now, before it costs you the next client.

_{*This content is part of a paid partnership with Cloud on Demand.}

🛒 Grocery Game On. There’s a new grocery player in town, and it might just be cheaper than Shoprite, Pick n Pay and Checkers. Skubu has just launched its pilot store in Diepsloot, Jozi. It allows customers to bring in their own containers to buy food and other household goods in the quantities they can afford. Everything from maize meal, cooking oil, sugar and rice, to cleaning products, all at a fixed price per litre or KG. Whoa. We’re taking note.

📐 Figma Preps for IPO. Figma’s finally going public — nearly two years after Adobe’s $20bn buyout went bust. The design darling just filed to list on the NYSE, citing surging AI investment (200+ mentions in their prospectus, lol) and massive revenue gains. With $749m in 2024 revenue and 46% YoY growth, this could be one of 2025’s hottest tech listings. Can they beat that old $20bn valuation? Watch this space.

💰 SA’s Payment Habits. Stitch just dropped their 2025 South Africa Consumer Payments Report, with key insights into SA’s payment landscape, including: 90% of respondents have tried a new payment method (not cash or card) in the last year, debit orders evoke an 85% negative sentiment (hahaha), and SA’s preferred payment methods. Mega interesting…

📬 Email, but make it AI. Grammarly just scooped up Superhuman — the elite email startup once known for its snobby waitlist and snappier replies. Superhuman’s CEO is joining Grammarly, and they’re planning to fold AI agents into inboxes to build a smarter productivity suite. Email’s still the most-used work app, so this could get spicy. Next stop: AI that replies to your boss and schedules your Padel tourney?

⚡ Power Up. Jozi’s City Power is toying with the idea of replacing some of its fleet with EVs. This comes off the back of the city’s acquisition of some EV charging stations to become a leader in the green economy. Interestingly enough, they’re also introducing a battery-swapping system to allow for depleted batteries to be exchanged for fully charged ones, reducing waiting periods. Pretty cool. Hope it works well.

🚛 Back it up. Swathes of South Africans are reportedly semigrating (*checks notes) back to Jozi? This comes as more and more companies are returning to in-person work, prompting a rising demand for rental apartments and estate homes near the city’s main commercial spots. We’ll always have The Valley of the Waves…

✅ The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with the best in IP offshoring and global market access with Finance Isle of Man, all your VC and startup legal sorted by Dommisse Attorneys, and loads more vital startup tools & services.

Yesterday, we asked what the real cheat code is in venture studio models, and most like the funding options…

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🚀 Faster than bootstrapping (8%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🧰 Full-stack team on day one (25%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🤑 Funding that actually works with you (34%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🤝 Mentorship without the fluff (25%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📈 Higher success rate, backed by data (8%)

ICYMI: We showed how these studios help startups double their returns. There’s even a whole podcast on how the model has helped SA founders scale faster.

Pro tip: Enter your email address right here, you’ll be the first to see new podcasts as they release. 😉

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