Fair play {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? While the rest of the world roils from AI job uncertainty, Chinese courts have simply ruled that companies cannot replace humans with AI. No special laws needed; just basic logic, they say. 💡

☝ Send this to a friend AI could never replace. 🤖

In This Open Letter:

Everyone celebrated SA’s highest matric pass rate in history, 88% in 2025, but of the 1.14 million learners who entered Grade 10 in 2023, just 57.7% made it through to pass, meaning almost half dropped out before they even sat down to write…

Factor in the 31’000 vacant teacher posts, the 30’000 educators who resigned or were dismissed in five years, and half of all primary school learners sitting in classes of 40+, and it’s clear SA education is actually in dire straits.

But this SA venture wants to give SA kids their futures back…

The app giving 500k learners what the classroom can't

Matric Live is a free mobile app for Grades 10–12 with interactive lessons, multiplayer quizzes, a bank of over 10’000 past exam papers, gamified leaderboards and an AI tutor called Kitso (Tswana for knowledge).

What makes Kitso different: Open-source LLMs give technically correct answers. But in a DBE exam, the right answer in the wrong format is still wrong, so the Matric Live team trained Kitso with 20 subject specialists against the CAPS curriculum, the annual teaching plan, and the exam guidelines. The feedback learners get is the feedback that actually counts in the marking room.

Founded by Kagisho Masae, who grew up in a township and received a scholarship to a private school at age 12, where, for the first time, he saw the disparity between two completely different worlds — and it never left him.

What the data reveals

Matric Live's usage data reveals something striking: Learners in the most under-resourced schools spend most of their time in the learning section, working through concepts their teachers may not have had time to cover. Wealthier learners gravitate straight to Kitso because they're already AI-literate and know how to prompt.

Same app. Completely different journeys. The digital divide isn't just about access to devices anymore; it's about knowing what to do with them.

Matric Live has helped over 2 million learners since its inception, with around 500k active every year. Kagisho is now in conversations with major financial institutions to attach real rewards (data, stationery, calculators) to the leaderboard as a way of funding the model while keeping the core product free.

We're watching this space…

It happens more often than anyone admits. A South African fintech or tech company builds something technically excellent (better infrastructure, better architecture, better product) and then watches a competitor with a weaker offering close the deal.

It’s not a design problem, it’s strategy: In high-trust industries, your brand is the first thing investors, enterprise buyers and regulators use to decide whether you're credible.

Before they evaluate your product, they evaluate your presence. And if your brand looks like it was built by your dev team on a long weekend, you're starting every conversation at a disadvantage.

The uncomfortable truth: In markets where trust is the most valuable commercial asset, the best product doesn't always win. The best-positioned one does.

When AI makes everything cheap, humans become the product. Economist Alex Imas uses historical data to show that once automation takes over, the real value shifts to relationships, not efficiency. Read the essay.

Paid search or social ads first? We built a workflow to help you figure out whether Google Ads or social media advertising is the right starting point for your business. Discover your ideal ad type.

R40k+ in free business tools. The Founder Collab gives you a community of SA founders helping each other win, 40+ hours of masterclasses, and a stack of business perks from day one. See what's inside.

🚀 Raising The Roof In The Mother City. 14 Cape Town-based founders have raised a total of more than R9 billion in VC funding since 2019 across FinTech, AgriTech, data, AI and more. Recognise all 14 of these Cape Town founders and their ventures?

🦌 Bluebuck Bounces Back. Colossal Biosciences will bring South Africa’s extinct bluebuck (which used to roam the coastal grasslands of the south-western Cape region until its extinction in the 1800s) back to life. It’ll be the Dallas-based startup’s 6th de-extinction.

🚆 Back On Track. UAE-based African Rail Co. is raising a cool R2.8 billion to buy locomotives and wagons to run in SA. ARC was one of 11 successful bidders to run trains on our freight network and part of Govs R2 trillion plan to get private companies to boost SA rail efficiency.

🤝 EWAvengers Assemble. Local platforms Paymenow and PayCurve have joined forces, with the new venture set to operate under the Paymenow brand. Together, they'll offer employees early wage access, debt rehabilitation, money coaching and automated savings.

Yesterday, we featured the Pagamio commerce platform, asking about your worst payment experience. Most here have had the signal nightmare…

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💳 Card machine died at the worst possible moment — 10%

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 📵 No signal, no sale; lost out completely — 40%

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🧾 Reconciliation was so wrong, I just gave up — 15%

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🤷 I still carry cash just in case — 30%

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 😅 I once tapped my phone at a braai and it worked better than most POS systems — 5%

Your 2 cents…

Stranded in Romania because of a three-letter typo. Payments infra, peeps. 🇷🇴💀

On 5 May 1992, id Software released Wolfenstein 3D, technically not the first first-person shooter ever made, but the one that turned the genre into a phenomenon.

The trick? Shareware. The first episode was free; the next two cost money. It sold 200k copies in year one and turned id Software into a household name overnight. A year later, they followed up with Doom, and the rest is gaming history.

Psst… Wanna play the original Wolfenstein for free? Here you go. You're welcome. 🎮

🧩 Tool to Try: Brivvy lets you define your brand voice once and use it across any AI.

🌍 That's Interesting: Rinsing your mouth after brushing actually increases cavity risk; dentists say just spit and let the fluoride sit.

🎨 Next Level: This dog plays keepy-uppy with humans without missing a beat.

🕹️ Wow Site: Cursor Camp lets you hang out with other people’s cursors from around the world. Best on desktop.