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In This Open Letter

Your best institutional knowledge lives in one inbox and one head. The day that person is out, so is the answer. This local startup is building the map that keeps it in the building.

Every company has one.

The operator who knows where the bodies are buried (or at least all the important stuff that keeps the lights on and the wheels turning).

But then they go offline for a week. A client phones chasing an order, and nobody can tell them a thing. All of it sits in one inbox and one head.

That scattered-knowledge problem is the exact reason why most companies can't get AI to do much. See, an AI agent is only as clever as the context you give it. It's so bad that eight in ten companies say scattered, patchy data is what's blocking them from scaling AI agents.

The local startup giving company AI a memory

Verascient is the team companies bring in to actually make AI work. It wires up every tool a business already runs, builds one living map of who knows what, and then builds and runs the agents on top.

That map is the heart of it.

It connects your email, drives, calendar, transcripts and CRM, and their agents ingest the lot, linking every person, project and decision, so a call today knows what that client emailed your team last year.

Their agents even talk to each other, one pinging another when it is missing a detail.

We caught up with Verascient Co-founder & CEO Keagan Stokoe, who learned to build startups on the early fibertime team. Together with his Co-founder & CTO Emile Ferreira, an early hire at Replit (now a unicorn) while still at school, their first product was a hallucination detector.

It was cool, but impossible to sell. Every time the big AI models improved they hallucinated less, so the problem Verascient was solving kept shrinking.

What they're building now is something a person on the ground actually feels. Because once a company's memory is in place, something pretty interesting starts happening: Verascient's agents notice the work flowing through the business. The same Monday report, the same follow-up email, the same quote that always needs chasing. Over time, they start picking that work up themselves and handing it back already done, just needing a human to check it out.

That's the part that excites Keagan most. Letting a growing company take on more clients, more orders, more work, without the team drowning in the repetitive stuff (the kind of stuff nobody wants to do anyway).

In the past, a company's knowledge left the office at 5 PM. Verascient wants to build a future where it stays and keeps compounding.

We're watching this space…

Have your say below 👇🏼

Buyers see being overly dependent on one big client as a risk, and it drives down your business value. So we got the co-founder of an SA valuation firm that's run thousands of valuations to show us how to spot dangerous customer dependence.

And it turns out, there are 4 specific steps to check if you're dependent on one customer before it caps what you're worth.

☝ Send this to a founder whose whole business rests on one big account.

🌠 Skies Put On a Show. SA's freezing winter nights have a payoff: the Southern Delta Aquariids meteor shower peaks on the night of 30 to 31 July, with up to 25 shooting stars an hour. Wrap up warm and look up.

💊 SA's Shot at Ebola. Mauritius-based, African-owned Xylomed Pharmaceuticals has developed a candidate oral Ebola treatment and is lining up a R655m Phase 3B trial across the DRC, Uganda and South Sudan. Huge if it lands.

📺 e.tv Goes Continental. Netflix has licensed etv's content for its African library, kicking off with new primetime drama The Four of Us. Free-to-air first, streamer the next day. A cheap, clever win for Netflix.

🌊 Data Centres Out to Sea. Squeezed by land, water and unhappy neighbours, Samsung's shipbuilding arm plans a floating 50MW AI data centre by 2028. The sea offers ready cooling; saltwater and storms offer new headaches.

💡 SMEs No Longer Flying Blind. If you're running a business without financial direction, you're taking unnecessary risks. Finvoke gives founders on-demand CFO support: strategic, tax-smart and priced for SMEs.*

🌍 Going Global, Simplified. Finance Isle of Man is already embedded in SA's top business networks. For founders eyeing an international structure, it's the starting point: one visit, one conversation, one step closer to a global setup that actually works.*

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

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Yesterday, we showed you Timelaps AI's brand tracker, asking how you actually know if your brand marketing is working. Turns out most of you want it affordable and always-on…

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📊 We've got continuous brand tracking dialled in (11%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📉 An agency deck once or twice a year, that's it (11%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🎲 We mostly fly blind and read the sales numbers (11%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 💸 Show me affordable and always-on and I'm in (45%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ ⚡ Brand's a nice-to-have, we're all-in on performance (22%)

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Got a favourite? Meet all the South of Series A characters here.

☝ Send this to a friend you'd build a startup with. 🦄