More human than human {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? Some Joburg peeps have taken a liking to this one Montecasino restaurant's AI waiter, who's apparently able to provide even better recommendations than a human waiter. 😋🍽️

☝ Send this to a friend you’d take to an AI dinner. 🍕🍷

In This Open Letter:

SA banking fraud surged 86% in 2024, with cases almost doubling from 52k in 2023 to 98k in 2024, losses climbing 74% to a record R1.888 billion. And now it’s going global  – which is where this SA venture’s hoping to put a stop to it… 

Would you believe geography is accelerating SA’s fraud curve: Romance scams and vishing (voice scams) have doubled every year since 2023 in Europe, and cross-border mule networks now mean that fraud committed in Africa is being cashed out in Frankfurt and London.

Of course, banks respond with detection systems using rules-based thresholds to block transactions (over a certain amount, from a high-risk region or too many transactions, too often).

The problem with that is that high false positive rates in fraud detection block many legitimate customer transactions, especially in emerging markets like ours.

When Africa’s locked out

On average, only one in five blocked transactions turns out to actually be fraudulent (eek, that’s an 80% false-positive rate!), so the cure became its own kind of crisis.

The big thing is that real fraud isn't random: It's behavioural, patterns that unfold over weeks, in small increments that are near-impossible for rule-based detection to solve properly. And it’s those patterns a local venture is looking to surface…

The local player turning behaviour into a weapon

Locstat is a Cape Town-founded decision intelligence platform that sits inside a bank's own environment and uses graph database technology to catch fraud before it happens. 

Like in Tom Cruise’s Minority Report, just with actual science, Locstat’s cracked two fraud types that still baffles international competitors: 

We sat down with co-founder Sanjay Daya, who says Locstat has a very low false-positive rate, which is how they could save one client some R165 million in agent commission fraud alone across Africa in a single instance.

Going places

Locstat started building digital twin environments in defence, but pivoted to Financial services when it landed Flash as a client in 2018, then signed Standard Bank Uganda, and has been building its banking moat ever since.

Last year, they closed a R50M pre-Series A, and the teams are now based across Cape Town, Lisbon and the UK, with a German sales rep incoming to chase the European compliance wave.

Not every day you see a homegrown company doing what dollar-funded global rivals couldn't, now raising $10M to go global themselves.

We're watching this space…

Who still gets match updates via websites?

SA’s Kaizer Chiefs came in 17th worldwide for their millions-strong WhatsApp community.

Here's what they do differently:

✅ Treating WhatsApp like a broadcast channel, not a chatroom
✅ Layering exclusive content (think Amapiano drops, BTS) on top of news
✅ Turning supporters into a 2.8m-strong owned audience

Chiefs are more than a sports club; they’re a proper business. But they’re not selling on WhatsApp, they're using their biggest drawcard (the team and matches) to build distribution they own. Know any sports or teams that should have a dedicated fan channel?

What would you build on WhatsApp today?

The standard SA payments ritual goes something like: Founder hits the point where they need to take card payments online, they go with Stripe (‘cos that’s what the media says), until they hit the country selector.

Then they spend the next three months (maybe a couple of thousand rand in legal fees) incorporating a Delaware C-Corp so they can plug it in.

It's become so normal that nobody questions it anymore. But step back and the picture is strange: SA businesses, with SA customers, paying in rands, are restructuring around a US entity to access a payments product designed for the US market?

The cost isn't just the lawyers: It's the tax exposure, the banking complexity, the audit overhead and the slow drift away from being a real South African company.

The assumption underneath all of it: Serious payments infrastructure has to come from outside Africa. That assumption is about a decade out of date.

🧱 Toughen Up, Cupcake. German building materials firm Heidelberg Materials has set its sights on acquiring local cement maker PPC. While it's still early days, the 134-year-old cement manufacturer is currently valued just over R10 billion. Very interesting.

🫣 Jus Birdboxin It. The overwhelming majority of South African devs have little to no career framework. And whatever frameworks were in place are slowly being eroded by AI. We dive into an OfferZen report to unpack what this means for companies hiring devs right now.

🏎️ Bot Racing. In the last six months, Formula 1 has seen 8 new AI partnerships join the grid, including Anthropic’s Claude at Atlassian Williams, Google’s Gemini at McLaren and even F1 itself partnering with AWS for generative AI for live television broadcasting. Makes sense since the FIA seems hell-bent on turning F1 into Formula E anyway…

👩🏾‍🌾 Harvesting The Awards. Our friends at eFama’s Pretty Kubyane have just won the Wired4Women Tech Entrepreneur Award. Now in its 3rd year, the awards celebrate leading women in SA tech. Huge congrats, Pretty!

☁️ Margin Mechanics. If you're in SaaS (or a reseller) wrestling with cloud margins, vendor access or marketplace reach, keep an eye on The Open Letter next week. We're unpacking how a handful of SA software companies have rewired the cost, compliance and go-to-market problem entirely. Can’t wait? Get on the list →*

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

The most expensive word in sales isn't "no", it's "maybe". And SA founders, polite to a fault, end up burning months on deals that were never going to close. That’s why we brought in an SA sales leader to teach us a bit about sales.

Turns out, there are a few specific steps you can take to get an answer faster in sales.

☝ Send this to that friend who’s forever “just checking in”… 🫠

Yesterday, we featured Matric Live’s free tutoring app, asking which feature would be most beneficial for SA learners. Interactive lessons took the top spot…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 📚 Interactive lessons by subject — 35%

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 📝 Mock exams using past papers — 22%

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🏆 Rewards tied to the leaderboard — 22%

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤖 Definitely an AI tutor — 15%

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🎮 Multiplayer quiz challenges — 6%

Your 2 cents…

Hmm, interesting idea, David, we gonna let the guys at Matric Live know… 💚📚

Want to win $1m? The Pitch by Deel is a global startup competition with a $1 million investment prize — apply from SA now.

Early-stage SA tech founders? Get R40k+ in business-building tools, strategy sessions, cloud support, legal vetting and more when you join The Founder Collab.

African startup or MSME with an MVP? GEC+Africa 2026's Regional Pitch Competition selects 10 finalists to pitch live in Cape Town — could be your moment. Register now.

Female founder building across Africa? The 2026 KPMG Female Founders in Africa Competition backs women-led ventures with resources, networks and mentorship. Apply now.

Want to actually build with AI? Startup Grind Joburg's AI Hackathon runs on 15 May, 10 am–2 pm at REGENT Business School — prototype and find where AI fits. Register here.

🧩 Tool to Try: TwainGPT rewrites AI-generated text to sound more like you.

🐘 That's Interesting: Nzou, a female elephant in Zimbabwe, has shunned other elephants and become the matriarch of a herd of buffalo instead. She’s been the buffalo queen for decades — even fighting off actual buffalo challenging her for supremacy.

🎥 Next Level: This videographer shows you what lies beneath the stream.

🏖️ Wow Site: Magnified Sand shows you microscope images of sand from beaches all around the world.