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In Today’s Open Letter

South Africa has 12 official languages and only 8.7% of the country’s population speaks English at home, yet every company tries to talk to them in English. Now these founders are delivering the fix…

Not just website and marketing, but important docs like insurance policies and financial docs with fine print most native English speakers can't even make heads or tails of, let alone someone for whom English is their fourth language.

Some have tried using general chatbots to translate, leading to hilarious hallucinations, like that Canadian airline whose bot conjured a bereavement discount that did not exist.

Pain and gain

It's something that SA founders Pieter Bosman and Garth Shoebridge experienced firsthand while working in financial services. They saw companies having to answer the same questions over and over again. So they built a better way…

The platform turning company content into a conversation

Molo is a platform that takes all your company content (website content, product and policy documents, brochures, FAQs, terms and conditions, even call-centre scripts) and lets people ask it questions rather than read it.

Importantly, they can ask questions in any language.

Every staff member gets a smart link they can share by WhatsApp, email or text, and the customer starts chatting. The assistant runs around the clock, fields all the stock-standard questions (usually 8 out of 10 call centre queries) in any SA language, and only escalates the ones that need a human hand.

The trick to being hallucination-free

Because Molo only knows your business's content and exactly where each answer comes from, it cannot wander off-script. That's why it can run inside Momentum as MConnect, where it's already been used by 1'000 advisers for five years.

Pieter and Garth tell us that a wider corporate rollout is up next.

So, we're watching this space…

What if Claude were a colleague in your Slack? Claude Tag now lets you @-mention Claude in any channel; it then comes in and breaks tasks into steps, does the work, and tags you back in the thread when it's done. Lekker. Read more here.

Can you fact-check a YouTube video while you watch it? A new free Chrome extension scans captions in real time and checks claims against news sources, so you'll know if that confident creator is just confidently wrong. Grab it here.

What makes AI ethically risky, and what can you do about it? Praelexis breaks down the 3 properties of AI (autonomy, adaptability, interactivity) that create ethical complexity, and why understanding them is the first step to managing the risk. See how to de-risk AI in your business.

The number one objection FDC hears from executives: "I don't have time."

That's exactly the point.

FDC built their model for leaders who are too busy running the business to manage their own visibility. They assign you a dedicated content creator, account executive and account manager. They optimise your LinkedIn profile, create and publish content in your voice, and run strategic outreach to connect you with the decision-makers in your market.

You stay focused on the business. FDC closes the gap between who you are and how the market sees you. Everything is reported monthly through their FDC Exchange platform.

🍞 99c Bread. FNB and Boxer are giving qualifying customers 99c bread loaves. Since launching with Pick n Pay in 2024, FNB has handed out over 6.3 million loaves and saved customers R9.6 million. That’s banking doing some tangible good.

🔓 Fable Is Back. Washington has lifted export controls on Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 less than three weeks after blocking them. Anthropic agreed to proactively detect and address security risks. Yay, our access should be restored real soon.

🌿 100 Million Trees. Amazon is planting nearly 100 million Spekboom trees in SA through 1.95 million carbon credits over a decade, then reselling them through its Sustainability Exchange. Big bet on SA's carbon sequestration capacity.

🍌 Nano Banana 2 Lite. Google's latest image generation model creates text-to-image outputs in under 4 seconds, the fastest and most cost-efficient in the Nano Banana family. Yes, that's really what it's called.

📊 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.*

☁️ Cloud, Sorted. "Miles ahead in simplicity and reliability"; that's how one partner describes Cloud on Demand after watching month-end billing shrink from a chore to a click. If you resell, manage or build on the cloud, their partner programme takes the admin off your plate.*

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

Every step a user needs to take between signing up and unlocking value is a chance for them to give up on you. So we got an SA product strategist who's helped launch 150+ startups to show us how to cut the path and get people to the value faster.

And it turns out, there are 4 specific steps to speed up your product's time-to-value.

☝ Send this to a founder whose signups look great but whose activation doesn't.

Yesterday, we showed you Booka’s live music booking platform, asking who you'd actually book. Most here divert to pre-recorded stuff…

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🎸 A proper band for my year-end, if I knew it wouldn't cost a kidney (27%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🎤 Whoever my kid's school guilts me into hiring (0%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🪩 A DJ for my next braai-that-got-out-of-hand (6%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤵 Someone famous-ish, purely to flex in the group chat (17%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 😅 Nobody, I'd still chicken out and put on a Spotify playlist (50%)

Africa's largest employers are overwhelmingly South African, but too few are in tech.

💡 21 of the top 30 largest employers in Africa are South African, led by Shoprite (170'000+) and Bidvest (134'000+), who together employ more than 300'000 people.

💡 Retail, financial services and mining account for virtually the entire list: Shoprite, Pepkor, TFG, Woolworths, Mr Price, Pick n Pay, Clicks, Dis-Chem, Spar and Truworths all make the top 30. Not one tech company does.

💡 The non-SA names, Dangote (Nigeria), Ecobank (Togo), Safaricom (Kenya), Maroc Telecom (Morocco), signal a slowly diversifying continental landscape as the AfCFTA deepens integration.

For founders: Africa's largest employers are all legacy sectors. The tech employer gap isn't a failure; it's the opening. The next generation of Africa's biggest companies will be the ones that combine scale with digital transformation.

🧩 Tool to Try: Noodle Tomato runs entire faceless YouTube channels for you.

🎬 That's Interesting: After watching The Magnificent Seven (1960), Akira Kurosawa was so impressed by the American remake of his film, Seven Samurai, that he sent director John Sturges a ceremonial Japanese sword as a gift.

🐐 Next Level: Watch these klipspringers hide from a pack of wild dogs on the edge of a cliff, pure survival instinct.

🌍 Wow Site: Before I Die is a collection of people’s hopes and dreams from around the world.