Love yourself a little robot {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? Here’s footage of a cutesy delivery bot just straight-up smashing through a bus stop glass panel in the US. Prolly needs new lenses. 🤷‍♀️

In Today’s Open Letter

SA’s R944.9bn insurance industry (and so many others) are drowning in high-effort paperwork – thankfully, these guys are coming to streamline it…

How does insurance still require 30-odd pages of paperwork in 2026?

You know, the PDF with half the fields greyed out, where Section E only applies if you're in agriculture, but nobody tells you that. Fill, scan and email it, and two days later: "Could you also send us a copy of your ID?"

For 90% of organisations, friction in digital application processes causes abandonment rates of up to 40%. That’s a TON of money left on the table by a needlessly painful process.

In this day and age of getting near-instant insurance quotes from certain progressive providers, a two-day turnaround is killer (we touched on it in this Open Letter).

And let’s just be clear: PDFs on a screen don’t count as “digital transformation”.

The local venture streamlining onboarding

insdi (a portmanteau of “instant” and “digital”) is a structured data acquisition platform that lets businesses gather complex, conditional information from their clients, securely and without the email ping pong.

Industries with caveat-heavy and client-specific requirements (insurance, healthcare, property, compliance) now get a guided submission flow, with a single link the client completes in their own time. 

The magic for the client is insdi’s advanced rules-based branching logic that only shows them relevant fields and screens, pre-filled where necessary and auto-saving for stop and returns.

On the business side, there are simple ways to reduce multi-party information gathering steps and structured data that can go straight into its existing systems via webhook, CSV, or OneDrive sync.

The end of death by form

insdi founder Joel Rothman (with years of insurance tech experience) told us he knew the paperwork burden all too well. But when his wife was in and out of the hospital, the sheer number of late-night forms got to him, so he and actuary-turned-entrepreneur Nic Esterhuysen built insdi.

They landed a group-scheme healthcare initiative as an early customer for 6 months, which led to numerous insurance, real estate, HR and logistics clients (they’ve processed over 700k submissions with a 4.8/5 average user rating).

And that first client is still with them, so they must be doing something right.

For us, reducing effort (and typing) to zero is a reason to keep watching this space…

Following the AI race closely? OpenAI just shut down Sora & scrapped its Disney deal to double down on infrastructure with a new model in development. Read more here.

Deploying AI agents but worried about risk? NVIDIA’s NemoClaw adds policy-based guardrails, privacy controls, and local model execution to OpenClaw agent setups. Check it out here.

Still running slow, expensive market research? Evidenza uses AI-generated customer personas to simulate surveys in hours, not months, with 88% accuracy. Try it here.

🎨 An AI design co-pilot: Check out the upgraded Google Stitch for AI-native design guidance to turn prompts, screenshots and brand inputs into full UI designs. See it in action.

⚡ Show this to your dev: Working on loads of Claude Code projects? Founder Collab member and insdi co-founder Joel Rothman (from today’s main ☝) built this tool called PTSD to easily switch and organise projects in Terminal.

What tools or skills would you like to see here? Reply to this email and let us know…

Finance doesn’t run on “mostly right.” It runs on math.

In The Architecture Behind AI-Native Revenue Automation, Tabs’s CTO breaks down why LLMs alone aren’t enough—and what it actually takes to build audit-ready, AI-driven contract-to-cash systems for modern B2B teams.

Get the whitepaper

🚀 Easier portfolio diversification: Crypto on one platform, US stocks on another and forex in between. Sound familiar? Luno has quietly launched something that puts all of it in one place. More on that next week. Keep an eye on Luno.*

🥴 Smart Dumb Phones. US phone company Meadow has just released a dumb phone with a 3-inch TFT display, 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, and just a few basic apps come with it — it doesn't even connect to any app store. Hello productivity.

🚅 Keep It Rolling. The Gautrain just announced a bunch of new routes and stations, including about 45 km of underground rail. The new routes will expand to Soweto, Mamelodi, Springs, Atteridgeville, Fourways and parts of the West Rand. Nice.

📞 Truecaller Moves In. Despite being one of the most downloaded and used apps in SA, Truecaller has only just opened up an official local office to diversify its global business. Lekker — keep those spammers and scammers at bay.

🌍 Thinking Offshore? For SA founders going global, the Isle of Man offers 0% corporate tax, 0% capital gains tax and UK VAT access. Finance Isle of Man helps companies move, structure and scale internationally, without the usual friction.*

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

Get the best in SA tech and business news →

Yesterday, we showed you Little Landlord’s property management tech, asking about the biggest pain in managing a rental property. Most say the rental agent…

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ 🧾 Invoicing and collecting payments (21%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🧑‍💼 The rental agent (24%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🤷 I don't have a rental property (20%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 😵 The 3PM Saturday call about something broken (20%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🧽 Cleaning up the mess after they've moved out (15%)

Your 2 cents…

Shame, R. You're paying for the middleman and still doing the middle; time to cut out the chaos! 🏠✂️

PayShap hits R709 billion in just three years — and it’s still accelerating.

South Africa’s instant payments system is scaling fast:

💡 Since 2023, PayShap has processed 777 million transactions worth R709 billion.

💡 Replacing slow EFTs with mobile numbers or ShapIDs, now across 14 banks.

💡 New features like PayShap Requests are pushing it into everyday commerce.

The bigger shift? As adoption grows, PayShap is laying the groundwork for a real-time, cash-light economy — with QR payments and fintech integrations next on the roadmap.

🐶 Tool to Try: CANIQO analyses photos of your dog to generate a health score.

👍 That’s Interesting: A Canadian court ruled that a thumbs-up emoji 👍 can count as a legally binding signature in a contract dispute.

🍕 Wow Site: Pizza Voter lets a group rate toppings and calculates the best pizza combo with friends.