A little IoT {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? Apparently, a man discovered that his parents' smart coffee machine used a terabyte of data in 10 days. Lashing out at the brand on X, he says they can use a normal, dumb coffee machine like the rest of us. ☕

In This Open Letter

A Free State-trained dietitian and her brother just raised $38M (R627M) to build out Healthleap, an AI that finds the hospital patients everyone else misses…

An SA sister and brother just pulled $38M (R627M) out of some of Silicon Valley's best-known investors. At once an $8M (R132M) seed co-led by Sequoia Capital and First Round Capital and a $30M (R495M) Series A led by Hummingbird Ventures.

The twist? You won't find Healthleap in a single SA hospital; it's based in San Francisco. In fact, we only picked it up when Roelof Botha (yes, that Roelof from Sequoia) took to X to congratulate them. 🇿🇦

Here's what you should know…

A dietitian and her (very) entrepreneurial brother

Jemima Meyer studied dietetics at the University of the Free State (UFS), but it was during her community service at the SA Military Health Service that she realised how many malnourished patients slip through the cracks. So she built a spreadsheet to help colleagues at an SA hospital do their nutrition calculations faster.

Her brother Josiah is the startup guy: he ran his first businesses as a teen before studying actuarial science and machine learning at UFS, and in 2021 Jemima brought him in as CEO and 3rd co-founder Ray Botha on as CTO to turn the spreadsheet into an app called NutriLeap – then it raised a $1.1M (R18M) pre-seed on zero revenue, which they used to go to the US.

Cos here's the thing they realised: an app makes one dietitian faster, but it does nothing for the patient nobody has flagged in the first place. And SA hospitals aren't set up to benefit from this kind of improved patient care, but US hospitals are.

So from late 2022, they rebuilt the product as Healthleap, an AI that plugs into the hospital's own electronic health records, reads every patient's updated file at night, builds patient malnutrition risk scores and gives staff a daily ranked list of patients. The more they find, the more money the hospital makes AND the more lives they save. Noice.

They're obvs using the money to build tech to spot more conditions, but here are some lessons we take from their story:

We're watching this space…

Have your say…

We're all chasing growth, but the founders who've been there will tell you it hides one particular peril you're not considering in year one at all: growth often makes you drift away from your core client.

When you hit year seven, you've likely added a product line (or four), built a team, chased a bigger logo and said yes to an adjacent segment that looked like easy money.

But somewhere along the way, the picture of your customer got blurry:

Sound familiar?

It's no one's fault; it's drift that accumulates one reasonable "yes" at a time.

The difference is that experienced founders know to expect it and correct course.

For three decades, software was slow and expensive to build, and that cost kept competitors out. But AI's removed the wall, so we asked Sizwe Nxumalo of 3 Capital Ventures what actually protects a software business now.

And it turns out, there are 6 places a startup moat actually comes from, and none of them is on your feature list.

🏡 LekkeSlaap Stays Local. SA family offices, including GT Ferreira's and the Dippenaars', plus Investec have bought LekkeSlaap as its founders exit. Not Airbnb, not Booking, local money. A garage startup from 2009 just paid out. Lekker.

🐕 Kibble With Your Name. Cape Town's BuddyMeal now makes dry dog food for one specific dog, weighed, labelled and delivered free. The clever bit: knowing the exact portion means knowing when the bag runs out. That's a subscription, not a bag.

🎨 Seven Free Adobe Clones. A developer used Claude to build free open-source clones of seven Adobe apps, partly out of anger at cancellation fees. Early users say the basics still break. Features are cheap now. Trust isn't.

📊 From Data to Decisions. Siloed reporting and messy data make AI impossible. Praelexis AI has spent 13 years helping finance, health, retail and agriculture teams turn data into action — through AI strategy, data integration and GenAI implementation that fits the business.*

🧾 Unbilled Work, Found. Because time and invoices finally sat in one dataset, Clarity surfaced work an agency had delivered and never billed. Money already earned, quietly leaking. It recovered 5% of revenue, every month. How it found it →*

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

Engineering leaders often roll out an AI tool the way they rolled out Jira: hand it over and wait for the productivity boost. Adoption spikes for a week, then drops off a cliff.

That's why OfferZen asked Stephan Swart, Fractional CTO and AI adoption coach, how to make it stick. His take: it's a change-management problem, not a software rollout. Set clear boundaries, give people room to experiment safely, and scale only what works.

It’s an on-demand video you can watch for free: how leaders turn AI into team capability.

Ask around, and you'll hear it: people are quietly worried about what AI means for their jobs. What nobody has is South African numbers on how common that feeling really is.

DayOne is asking. Its State of AI Delivery in South Africa survey covers job security alongside the hard delivery questions: what's live, what's stuck in pilot, where budgets go and which skills are missing.

DayOne is a network of vetted AI professionals that businesses bring in on demand. Founder Liesel Bester started it to keep SA's best AI talent visible and ready.

The survey closes on Thursday, 15 October. One person who completes it wins R10'000 in cash, and the full report lands on 9 November.

Yesterday, we showed you SVYP's pop-up data gathering, asking what you do when that discount pop-up slides up. Two-thirds of you are gone before it finishes loading…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🏃 Close it before it even finishes loading (66%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🕵️ Hand over my junk email, take the code and scram (27%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ ✍️ Give my real address, it's only polite (7%)

🎬 Video Editor & Post-Production Specialist @ Old School

💳 Director, Specialist Sales (Payment Gateway) @ Mastercard

📊 Analytics Engineer II, Pipeline @ Capitec

💻 Software Engineer @ Ozow

📋 Senior Product Manager @ Amazon

📣 Paid Media Manager (Retail Media) @ Takealot

Leather 101 Workshop, 24 Oct, Kleinmond: Cut, stitch and finish your own leather keyring in 90 minutes, tea and cake included. Get tickets.

Founder Story: Building Yaga, 13 Oct, Cape Town: Co-founder Aune Aunapuu on how the Estonian preloved fashion marketplace found its biggest market in South Africa, at Innovation City. Get tickets.

The State of AI Delivery ZA 26, 9 Nov, Online: DayOne launches its report on what SA businesses are actually deploying in AI, what's stuck in pilot and which skills are missing. Register free.

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⚽ Next Level: People can't decide whether these Brazilian girls freestyling football is next level or not. What do you think?

🪐 Wow Site: Three Body Orbits is an atlas of real celestial bodies that sometimes find temporary solution orbits to the three-body problem.