Mario Kart COD {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? Possibly the best thing AI has given us is the ability to mash up games: from skateboarding in Call of Duty to sniping in Minecraft, there's a lot there already. But which games would you mash?

In Today's Open Letter

SA is running out of engineers, and the problem starts at school as maths and science participation dropped significantly – so this venture's using AI to boost our STEM…

It's way worse than most will admit: SA is short of tens of thousands of engineers (some say 60k roles need to be filled as you read this), because SA only has 1 engineer for every 3'000 people (it's meant to be 1 per 300).

Why? Maths participation has been slipping: only 34.1% (1 in 3) of last year's matriculants had maths as a subject, and the pass rate also slid from 69.1% to 64% in one year. The number of distinctions virtually halved from 9'752 in 2024 to 4'897 in 2025.

And it's a massive problem for our economy, which is heavily dependent on mining, farming, forestry, trade, manufacturing, transport and storage – all industries that rely on engineering to maintain and grow.

One SA founder who knows the problem is Gabi Immelman (who we had on the podcast in April 2024): A former teacher with a theatre degree, she was running her own online coding school when the 12-year-olds in her classes kept asking about AI. Something clicked, and she began building…

The coding school that became a STEM teaching partner

Mindjoy is a South African teaching and learning partner for STEM that works inside schools and universities to add teaching capacity. What started as augmented tutoring has now become a full-fledged programme, with Mindjoy's own people inside faculties and running sessions with lecturers and helping redesign coursework.

What they build together is a feedback loop: students practise (often on paper), their work is marked against the lecturer's memo, and each student gets an explanation of where their working went wrong. Each week, the lecturer sees which students are falling behind and what the class misunderstood, in time to reteach it.

So what makes the approach unique is that it's not using AI to help tutor students; it's using AI to drive efficiency on their teacher/lecturer's side, helping them reach more students, with deeper understanding for better results – there's even peer-reviewed research around Mindjoy's method that shows it boosts students' problem-solving skills.

What we like is that Gabi knows slapping "AI tutor" on won't fix SA's real bottleneck. And having passionate people on the ground is so much more valuable than just a software investment.

We're watching this space…

We showed you how an SA company went from "good numbers" to data that actually tells them how to grow by joining Xero, payroll and time-tracking into a single dashboard with AI.

The thing is, it doesn't take months of tooling; all it takes is one discovery call with Finvoke:

That's how you get real insights, like: profit per hour by client, which retainers slipped underwater, who's billing and who's on the bench, whether growth is real or one account carrying the rest.

If you're an established SA business with real money moving (and the leaks are big enough that finding them pays for the looking), then it's time to see what your numbers have been hiding.

Win by bringing home what you learned abroad. Kaizer Motaung left Orlando Pirates for the Atlanta Chiefs in the US. Back in Soweto in 1970, he started his own club and ran it as a show: gold kit, a bold badge, real marketing. Kaizer Chiefs is now SA's most-supported club. Read the story.

Earn more by selling what you already know. Boxer started selling ad space and shopper data to its own suppliers. With in-store services, that "other income" jumped 35% last half, while groceries fought price deflation. The CEO's rule: only add income that feeds off the core. See the results.

Stay safe by stopping phishers with a selfie and a QR code. Coming soon to Capitec Business: every new online banking login gets approved on your app. Sign in as usual, take a quick selfie, scan the QR code on screen. A stolen password alone won't get anyone in. Get better business banking.

⚡ Eskom Finally Sells EV Charging. Thirteen years after SA's first public charger, Eskom has opened its first two stations in Durban, undercutting the biggest private operator on price. Great for drivers, but rivals are asking whether it's fair.

🧸 Checkers Eyes Toy Stores. After toy demand jumped in its Hypers and on Sixty60, Checkers says a standalone toy chain is on the table. The play: Toys R Us has to guess what kids want this Christmas; Checkers already has the data.

🤖 Meta Goes Closed. After years of free, downloadable Llama models, Meta's new Muse Wonder frontier models are rent-only. They're in the top group on independent tests, but the version developers can buy isn't the one Meta advertises.

🌾 Operations Simplified. InteliGro struggled with fragmented data and manual admin in their agri software. So Octoco built a unified system that cut admin, standardised crop recommendations and enabled faster, data-driven decisions for farmers and advisors.*

☁️ On The Cloud Isn't Enough. Being on the cloud and getting the most from it aren't the same thing. One is a migration; the other is a discipline: tuning cost and performance, and giving people secure, modern ways to work. See how SA operators are closing the gap.*

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

We featured Fynbos Money's investment platform and asked who's actually managing your money. And most here say they already ask ChatGPT about their retirement…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🤖 I already ask ChatGPT about my retirement (62%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🙈 My bank app, and I never open it (13%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📒 A spreadsheet I last updated in 2019 (25%)

Equity agreements (SAFEs) are quick to sign, but sign too many and you dilute the company: you can't raise, and there are too many people to pay before you can exit. So we asked a startup attorney how to avoid it.

And it turns out, there are 5 steps to stop too many SAFEs stalling your next round.

Young innovator building for safer spaces? The UN-backed SafeTech Africa HackLab will fund four youth-led solutions tackling digital safety, gender-based violence and child marriage, with R85k to R170k each. Closes 18 Oct. Apply now.

Black-owned business with a founder aged 18 to 35? Absa's R12m Youth Entrepreneurship Fund offers grants you don't repay, and that take no equity, plus mentorship and market access. Closes 31 Oct. Apply now.

Agritech startup with an MVP? UNDP's timbuktoo Launchpad takes African agritech teams into structured incubation, mentorship and investor-readiness support, with a new cohort every quarter. Apply now.

Need more than just advice? The Founder Collab bundles R40k+ in tools, cloud credits, legal sessions and a curated founder community into one membership for SA tech builders. Join now.

Want free AI skills training? Google Hustle Academy 2026 offers one-day bootcamps and 60-min webinars for SA entrepreneurs and SME owners. Register for free.

Want to promote your event/programme here? Let us know.

Biotech & Beers, 23 Oct, CPT: OneBio's quarterly evening for scientists, founders and biotech fans. Get tickets.

Operations in Notion with AI, 27 Oct, CPT: A live Notion and AI build session for ops people. Apply here.

Crisis in Real Time, 29 Oct, CPT: SnapScan CEO Paul Nel on leading through an incident as it unfolds. 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.

🧩 Tool to Try: Leakly analyses your website and funnel to show where buying intent drops off, then ranks what to fix first.

🐮 That's Interesting: In 1963, a tornado in Illinois carried several cows into the air. They survived, but "acted strangely for several days". Fair enough.