Doomsday prepping {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? A startup is apparently selling BNPL radiation-exposure kits, you know, in case you survive a nuclear attack. What next? ☢️
In This Open Letter
HealthTech: Making a medical career in SA worth it.
Local: SA gets a robot factory & new electricity prices.
Global: NASA lets AI drive its rovers to the moon.
Citizen Dev: He built WhatsApp shipping in a weekend.
Tech History: The day Google got cold feet on price.
Work Smarter: Make sure you're building the right thing.
🎤 Sizwe Nxumalo is coming to Joburg
The 3 Capital Ventures (VC) founder has backed SA's high-growth startups off the back of McKinsey and Uber Eats SA.
On 17 September, he shares what separates the companies that break out from the ones that stall, alongside Barry Swartzberg, architect of Discovery Health and Vitality's global expansion.
Early Bird tickets close 20 August.
TRENDING NOW
Making SA medicine worthwhile
Getting qualified in medicine and earning a decent amount is actually quite hard in SA. From barely-manageable specialisation rules to low opportunities, this local founder's building a solution for SA doctors…
We often hear of SA's doctor shortage (just 0.3 doctors per 1'000 people, less than a third of what the WHO recommends), but the route to a high-value medical career in SA is quite tough:
6 years' full-time study for a general qualification (the country actually increased our new graduate supply by 61% from 1'476 in 2017 to 2'369 in 2020).
That just puts you at GP level; for a top-flight career, you need to specialise (surgeon, oncologist, paediatrician, etc.).
But to specialise, you need to get a registrar position (same "resident" doctor in US TV shows) with the government, which is actually where the bottleneck sits: the health department's budget is not creating enough new registrar opportunities; those posts have barely moved in 10 to 15 years.
That long wait is perhaps what's driving SA's medical brain drain, the remainder leaking to private medical or even toward starting their own medical practice (an exercise that can easily cost you R1 to R2 million just to set up, so obvs not possible for everyone).
Even the lucky few who do secure a registrar position in SA have a hard time. Failure and success rates are not optimal…
Why? SA's registrar specialisation route is brutal:
The SA registrar nightmare
Can only study while working 60-hour clinic shifts in some of the most frantic environments imaginable: hospital trauma rooms.
Study off scattered PDFs, borrowed notes and WhatsApp groups.
Write some of the most stringent medical exams under those conditions.
That's exactly what local founder Yatin Badal (former CTO of a software consultancy) saw while his wife prepared for her final specialist exams using apps built entirely for the US and Europe. So obvs, he built her a local one…
Someone finally built for the doctor, not the doctor's paperwork
Lorraine Learn is an SA platform that helps registrars with adaptive exam prep mapped to the Colleges of Medicine of South Africa (CMSA) syllabus, built to run in short bursts on a phone, offline, around a clinical roster rather than a student timetable. Yatin's wife and her colleagues used it, and that helped build it out into a great tool.
But that's just the top of the funnel: The next part of Yatin's startup Lorraine's offering is Loop: An AI-native practice management system for doctors running their own practice. It can handle bookings, rescheduling, field statement queries on WhatsApp, handle the practice's records, run intake and only escalates to the doctor when a question crosses into clinical territory.
The idea is to keep building out tools that can take South Africans from would-be doctors, all the way through a successful career.
Lorraine at a glance
Learn: 80 registrars studying on it, over 900k practice questions and 100+ CMSA tracks, pushing into Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria and Uganda.
Loop manages the practice to free up the specialist from admin, with emergencies even triggering a hard escalation to the nearest hospital.
Hard lessons: Yatin already spent a month + $10'000 training a custom clinical model, only to have to shelf it because SA hasn't written the rules for whether AI counts as a medical device yet (hence Loop's escalation model, for now).
What we like is that Yatin built the Learn part with real users first; there's definitely something there. We'd be careful about positioning the practice management part, because helping graduates to leave public health to go private could sit wrong with some stakeholders (but we will agree it could help currently unemployed docs earn an income).
We get the spirit he's building with, though: Wanting to help along the entire career lifecycle in the niche, and we're quite excited to see what Lorraine rolls out next.
We're watching this space…
CITIZEN DEVELOPERS
Your co-founder built what over the weekend?!?
Thrif co-founder Nick Rout built WhatShip, an easy way to create a shipment to or from anywhere in SA, entirely inside WhatsApp, over a weekend.
The lekker clever part:
✅ No new accounts, no apps to download
✅ Pay with a Stitch Express payment link
✅ Supports The Courier Guy
Any other courier with an API could be bolted on the same way.
What's your team built that solves a real problem, but has nowhere safe to live (yet)?
Proudly sponsored by Salus Cloud
Employees everywhere are building real software with AI, but your IT can't let it near your production stack. Salus gives you a governed place to deploy employee builds safely: Any team, any AI agent, in your own cloud, under your rules. Real containers, any framework, the app stays yours.
WORK SMARTER
What if no one actually wants to buy what you’re selling?
Building has never been faster for SA founders, which means it's never been easier to burn a quarter shipping something nobody asked for. We asked an SA UX lead how to decide what's actually worth building.
Turns out, there are 5 specific steps to make 100% sure you're building the right thing.
IN SHORT
What’s shaking in tech and business…
🤖 SA Opens a Robot Factory. A former KZN teacher has opened a manufacturing plant for IRIS, the AI humanoid tutor, at Dube TradePort. Self-funded for seven years, it’s aimed at helping ease the 27'000 vacant teaching posts in SA.
⚡ New Power Prices. SA’s revised electricity pricing policy opens for public comment on Friday, unbundling tariffs across generation, transmission, distribution and retail. Cost-reflective means whoever's underpaying starts paying more, so keep an eye on where your mid-sized business lands.
🛰️ Rovers That Decide for Themselves. NASA is sending 3 autonomous CADRE rovers to the Moon in late 2026, where they will elect their own leader, assign their own tasks and replan as a group. The big question is what happens when two rival robots meet in space?
💬 New WhatsApp Business Prices. From 1 October, free-form replies inside WhatsApp's 24-hour service window become billable per message — human, chatbot or AI, no volume discount. Free was never a feature; it was customer acquisition. The rate card is now arriving.
📊 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.*
* From our partners. Find all the best service providers for your business in our Founder Stack.
WHAT YOU SAID
Who dis…?
Yesterday, we showed you the business of spam in SA, asking what you actually do when an unknown number rings. Most here don’t answer, either…
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🫥 Let it ring. If it matters, they'll WhatsApp (77%)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🕵️ Google the number first like a private investigator (18%)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 😰 Answer every time, because what if it's the school (5%)
Your 2 cents…
"What the study doesn't factor in is apps like Truecaller and iOS settings that suppress unknown numbers. I used call announce, but it screens known numbers too, and when you switch it off, you still can't see the unknown number, so returning the call is impossible. Nice feature that doesn't work properly. A lot of these stats are being driven by software, not behaviour."
Sharp catch, Trevor, when the phone screens for you, "I don't answer" and "I never saw it" start looking identical in the data. 📵
TODAY IN TECH HISTORY
The day Google got cold feet
On 18 August 2004, the day before its IPO, Google wasn't sure it would hit the $135-per-share price it had been hoping for, so it dropped the price to $85.
Asoundd, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
He he. Even the company that would go on to define the internet blinked on pricing day. 📉
LOOKING TO NETWORK?
SA business events coming up
Public Speaking Workshop with Verity Price, 22 Aug, Cape Town: The first African to win the World Championship of Public Speaking runs a half-day workshop for working women. R150. Join here.
Venture Summit at LeaderEx, 1 Sept, Sandton: Founders, funders and the people writing the cheques in one room, getting investor-ready, pricing a round, what's actually getting backed. Use code TOL for a free ticket. Register free.
Startup Stories: Bionuclex Research, 2 Sept, Cape Town: The team chasing multi-cancer early detection from a single blood draw, over lunch. R50. Get tickets.
Powered by Radi. Want your business event in front of 36,000 The Open Letter readers? Host it on Radi, and it lands here.
AROUND THE WEB
So hot right now…
🎨 Next Level: Watch the recent solar eclipse filmed from a NASA plane at 50'000 feet.
🕹️ Wow Site: ShadeMap simulates sun shadows for any time and any place on Earth.
NEXT STEPS
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