Feeling secure {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? Apparently, 44% of Gen Z workers actively sabotage their company's AI rollout, as new studies show AI is destroying jobs. So, no more quiet quitting, time for loud breaking 🫣?

In This Open Letter:

Millions of people have switched to using ChatGPT for search instead of Google – and, while there are loads of international tools, this SA company’s building the local GEO framework…

58% of consumers are already finding products and services through AI tools. 63% of websites now see traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. And 30% of gen AI users trust AI suggestions more than those from friends, retailers or search engines.

Here's the problem for brands: SEO gave marketers a rulebook (keywords, backlinks, page one), but there’s no AI search rulebook. And for SA brands specifically, it's worse: only 2% of global AI training data comes from Africa. The models most people use were barely trained on our market.

But perhaps, that’s also the gap…

The local startup watching what AI says about you

NUDG3 is a platform that tracks, measures and helps brands improve their appearance across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google's AI Overviews and more.

It runs tailored prompts daily across every major model, mapped across the full marketing funnel, pulling the responses into a dashboard that tracks: Where you rank, how often you show up and the sentiment (how the model talks about you).

That last one is where it gets interesting: High visibility with bad sentiment is a reputation problem. Good sentiment with low visibility is a growth opportunity. Knowing which situation you're in changes where you focus.

NUDG3's Boosters feature then generates AI-powered action items tied to real prompts with expected outcomes. Think of it as the SEO to-do list, rebuilt for how search actually works in 2026.

Meet the co-founders

CEO Siri Chetty spotted the opportunity while at Berlin venture studio Antler — the same day a European version announced its funding round. So he decided to build it for the Southern Hemisphere, and CTO Sandil Bhikha built the entire platform from scratch alongside Head of Sales Luca Garcez. 

NUDG3 landed Nestlé as its first client before the platform was even fully built.

Elvorne’s hot take:

GEO and AEO are not new; there are plenty of global players already, and with gen AI, these tools aren’t that hard to build. So the South African angle is important – local founders abhor expensive international tools. An affordable local one could do real well. But being first and maintaining adoption will likely be key here.

We're watching this space…

Here’s an uncomfortable truth about B2B in 2026: Your company page is a ghost town.

The average LinkedIn company post gets seen by less than 2% of followers. Meanwhile, individual posts from real people (founders, execs, team leads) are getting 5–10x the reach.

The shift has already happened: Buyers trust your people faster than your brand. So the companies winning on LinkedIn right now are the ones who turn their leadership team into visible, trusted voices in their industry.

If your executives aren’t active on LinkedIn, you’re invisible to the people making buying decisions. And your competitors’ leaders probably aren’t invisible.

R25M from an app you've never seen. This founder built a micro-SaaS for prison communication (no UI, no ads, no content) and made $1.5M in revenue from an extremely niche audience. Watch the playbook.

Cut your AI costs by half. Edgee compresses your prompts before they hit any LLM provider, cutting token costs by up to 50% with no code changes required. Try it here.

40+ hours of business masterclasses. When you join The Founder Collab, you unlock practical sessions on marketing, sales, scaling, and getting more customers — alongside R40k+ in useful business perks. See what you get.

📊 COVID Founders: The Reckoning. We've done a roundup of the SA ventures that raised money during COVID, looking at how they're doing now. Who won, who lost and what we can learn from it.

🍻 Drink Up. South Africans travelling to Europe can now ease the exchange rate pain for overseas beer. Heineken's Bar de Change at OR Tambo International Airport gives you digital vouchers for Euro beer at SA prices at participating European bars. Shoulda called it “Beer de Change”, duh.

🛣️ Hit The Road. SA has just ranked in the Top 10 for global self-driving holiday destinations. Coming in at a respectable 8th place, the Auto&General index analysed 10 data points, taking a holistic view of what makes a great driving holiday.

🛰️ The Real Game. Most dev shops just write software. Very few can engineer the full product: hardware, firmware and all. We're introducing a Stellenbosch-based team that does exactly that. Worth watching.*

🌍 African Funding Blitz. Startups across the African continent have enjoyed a boost in funding, with African tech startups raising a cool US$382 million in Q1 of 2026. That’s a mouthwatering 35% increase from Q1 in 2025. Now that’s lekker, hey.

⏱️ Payroll 8× Faster. Cape Union Mart's payroll team was stuck fixing errors and fighting downtime. So Deel Local Payroll, powered by PaySpace, replaced the old system with a cloud platform that cut payroll processing from 4 days to just half a day, eliminating downtime and freeing the team to focus on real operational improvements.*

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

Yesterday, we showed you Wunderfan’s sports rewards, asking about your sport of choice. And we’re firmly in rugbyland here…

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ ⚽ Soccer — 11% 

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🏏 Cricket — 17% 

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🏉 Rugby — 30% 

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🏌️ Golf — 17% 

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🏃‍♀️ Athletics — 0% 

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ What we missing... — 25%

Your 2 cents…

Fairways, no fouls and zero VAR drama — we respect the logic, Peter. 🏌️⛳

On 14 April 1912, the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg four days into its maiden voyage. Over 1'500 passengers drowned when the ship sank early the next morning.

But there was a piece of tech onboard: The Marconi wireless equipment allowed them to call for help. Not in time, but at least early enough to save about 700 lives. Without that wireless, the death toll would have been total.

🧩 Tool to Try: Valyris stress-tests your pitch or campaign for weak points.

🌍 That's Interesting: Chuck Norris wasn't offended by the viral jokes about him at all; he even had a favourite: the one where they couldn’t add his face to Mount Rushmore, because the granite wasn't hard enough for his beard.

🎨 Next Level: Watch this artist paint dinosaurs with light.

🕹️ Wow Site: 5-Minute Founder lets you test your startup decision-making.

🧠 Work Smarter: Greg Isenberg says now that AI can build anything, the moat isn’t code, it’s distribution. Here, he breaks down 7 distribution strategies every vibe coder needs to actually get customers.