Excited for kickoff {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? South Africa plays Mexico in the 2026 FIFA World Cup opener tonight at 21:00, but did you know the match ball has some serious tech in it? Here's what's inside and how it's made.

Send this to the friends you're watching tonight’s game with. ⚽

In Today’s Open Letter

Online retailing is growing in SA (from just 1% at R7.5 billion in 2016 to 10% at R100 billion today), but 90% of sales still happen at the till, where marketers can’t track and attribute – this startup turns them into a known profile with a single tap…

Five years ago, online retailers used to be able to follow customers all the way from the ad they clicked to the thing they bought (which is how they knew an ad actually worked), but then in 2021, Apple let iPhone users switch that tracking off. Most did, and Facebook alone lost something like $10 billion in 2022.

The broader impact is that retailers are now blind on both sides again: Online and in-store, where a jacket once again leaves the building without anybody knowing who bought it.

The startup making the anonymous shopper known

neXon has built the neXon Pixel, a device that sits between the scanner, POS and printer and reads the sale as it prints. When the first item scans, a small countertop unit lights up; the shopper taps their NFC-enabled phone or scans a QR code, enters their phone number once, and the receipt is theirs.

That tap turns a stranger into a profile and pushes it to Shopify, WooCommerce or Meta's Conversions API in real time. No app, no loyalty card required.

The dinner that changed everything

The idea started when co-founder Jonathan Williams was out for dinner with his wife and noticed the nest of cables behind a POS, asking why nobody had fixed the paper receipt. The rest came from the years he and co-founder Hein du Toit spent running WhatsApp marketing for retailers — always struggling to prove a campaign worked because they never knew if you actually bought anything in-store.

The in-store sale is the one clean signal left. neXon captures it, feeds it back so the system stops chasing people who already bought, and optimises the algorithm to drive more sales.

The receipt used to be the end of the sale. neXon is betting it's the start of the next one.

We're watching this space…

Has Anthropic just built the smartest AI model on the planet? Claude Mythos launched this week; available now as Fable 5 until 22 June, and permanently once they have enough compute. Read the announcement here.

What if a frontier AI model ran entirely on your laptop? Google's Gemma 4 12B is free, open-source, handles text, images, audio and video, and runs on any machine with 16GB RAM — no internet, no subscription. Download it here.

Is your business using AI responsibly (or just using AI)? Praelexis breaks down the 3 principles (responsibility, transparency, accountability) that separate defensible AI from liability waiting to happen. Read more here.

It’s a big SA sporting year, and Jonsson Workwear is putting 100'000 limited-edition Green & Gold Supporter Jerseys into the country, for free.

You simply go to their website, drop in your details, and you're in the draw. Winners collect from one of 30 stores nationwide. Screenshot your entry, post to stories, tag @jonssonworkwear_official and use #SupporterJersey to boost your chances.

Founder hack: Get your whole team to enter and start a Supporter Jersey Friday at the office. Easiest team-building moment of the year.

While you're on the site, browse shirts, chinos, jeans, footwear, women's range and branded company kit. Jerseys are limited.

🔋 Charge SA First. SA plans to add EV battery minerals to its automotive incentive programme to boost local electric vehicle production. We were wondering when the government was going to realise China's EV play. Good move.

📱 The Next Super App? MTN has tapped China's Ant International to try to build a new FinTech super app in Nigeria (after its MoMo platform went defunct there in 2025). In a country with 95% WhatsApp usage? Proves again that enterprises don't know what "super app" means.

🔓 88k IDs Leaked. Over 88'000 SA IDs and passports from an international cannabis platform have been left on a public URL. The researcher who found it sent four emails over 26 days. Zero response. You really need to be careful with your suppliers online these days.

🇿🇦 SA Roots, Lightspeed Money. SA-rooted Jarryd Strydom co-founded US legaltech startup Sandstone, which just closed a $30m Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners; six months after a $10m seed from Sequoia. Revenue grew 40x in 90 days. Customers include Wayfair, Grindr and ElevenLabs.

💰 Finance Sorted. Finance is the biggest reason SA SMEs fail. Finvoke gives startups and small businesses CFO-level insight (without paying a full-time salary) so you can grow with clarity, not guesswork.*

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

Most early-stage SA products fail in silence: You keep building when the real problem is that nobody knows the thing exists. So we got an SA product strategist who's helped launch 150+ startups to show us how she gets founders their first users with no audience and no budget.

And it turns out, there are 4 specific steps to get your first users when nobody knows you exist without spending a cent on ads.

☝ Send this to that friend who's been "almost ready to launch" for three months now.

Yesterday, we showed you The Surgical Assistant’s doctor matching, asking if a platform can actually stop SA’s brain drain. Most here say the state still has to do something…

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🩺 Yes, steady paid work is exactly what's missing (24%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💸 Only if it fixes the money fast (13%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🏥 Not without the state sorting out posts too (31%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ ✈️ No, the pull abroad is about more than pay (24%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤷 Who knows what once NHI hits (8%)

Your 2 cents…

Not holding back, Nkosi, and honestly, it's the question half the medical community is whispering, too. 🏥💸

What are Bafana’s actual chances in the World Cup?

💡 SA has only appeared at 3 previous World Cups (1998, 2002, 2010), but never advanced beyond the group stage.

💡 Yet, Bafana topped their CAF qualifying group with 18 points, edging out Nigeria by 1 point, despite being docked 3 points for fielding an ineligible player.

💡 Overall World Cup record: 9 matches played, 2 wins, 4 draws, 3 losses; tonight at the Estadio Azteca is a reverse rematch of the 2010 opener that SA hosted.

Don’t know about you, but we’re still rooting for SA all the way! 🇿🇦⚽

🧩 Tool to Try: Skiddee turns your script into narrated animated videos.

🎙️ That's Interesting: The oldest known human voice recording (1860) was never heard by its inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. He could capture sound waves on paper but had no way to play them back. It took 148 years for anyone to finally hear it.

👖 Next Level: Watch this guy create art on his fuzzy pants.

🌐 Wow Site: isUpMap is a live, open-source stock-map of internet outages, like a more visual Downdetector.