Spooky sensation {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? New research claims to have finally figured out what ghosts actually are: Infrasound from the pipes in old buildings tricking your brain. 🤷‍♀️

👆 Send this to a friend you want to take ghost hunting. 👻

In This Open Letter

SA's 150k spaza shops generate almost R200bn per year, serving 11.1 million people with patchy connectivity, transactions that don't reconcile and zero real-time visibility – it took this founder 20 years of Disney on Ice shows to figure out the fix…

Yiorgos Spanoudis spent over 20 years running merch tables at SA's biggest events: Ultra, Disney on Ice and every major festival in between. It’s not a small industry; SA's live music economy generates about R1.4 billion in ticket sales per year (and that's even before merch, food and drinks).

That’s Yiorgos’ playground: He’d coordinated some 200 untrained sellers on festival floors with patchy signal and zero margin for error.

In 2016, a terminal wasn't batched (the process of reconciling pending digital transactions into real money in your merchant account), and the money disappeared. For weeks, he chased the banks to no avail…

He travelled to Romania, the UK and Amsterdam looking for solutions. But platforms aren’t built for those operator problems, so he built his own to work in the chaos of festivals. Then he inadvertently stumbled into a MEGA realisation…

The breakthrough: festival chaos = everyday commerce

One day, trying to make a simple purchase, Yiorgos saw that the conditions that break payments at a music festival (no connectivity, no reconciliation, no visibility) are not unique to events.

Any one of SA’s 150'000 spaza shops, informal traders and small merchants sees the same problems every single day. And, here he was, the guy holding the solution to it all in his hands…

The local commerce platform built for chaos

Pagamio is Yiorgos’ commerce operating system, forged in live-event chaos, that he now built out for SA's real commerce economy.

It runs on Android and iOS, across smartphones, tablets and bank-issued terminals. Works fully offline when connectivity drops, syncing automatically when it returns. With Xero integration for accounting, as well as built-in stock and supplier management, HR, table management, menus, and real-time reporting: A single solution to replace the patchwork of disconnected tools most commerce businesses rely on.

A built-in VAS layer covers airtime, electricity, bill payments, money transfers and ticketing to add potential new revenue streams for merchants without additional systems. Nice.

We're watching this space…

If you've built a SaaS product in South Africa, you know the story: The first hundred customers feel like a victory, the next thousand feel like a tax.

Azure and AWS bills start climbing faster than revenue, the only thing more expensive than hiring a full-time cloud architect is not hiring one, and selling into your bigger customers (banks, insurers, government) comes with these crazy compliance and security requirements that your three-person team was never set up to answer.

The local picture makes it harder: South African SaaS players don't usually have direct vendor agreements with hyperscalers. The tools you actually need (marketplace, channel access) are priced for companies way larger than you.

That’s why most SA venture founders end up paying full retail prices for cloud, while having to figure out their own GTM and ISO certifications along the way.

The thing is, the SaaS ventures we see overseas don’t build everything solo; they leverage within their ecosystem. How do you replicate that in South Africa?

🚢 Their Ship’s Coming In. Local e-commerce merchant technology and smart logistics platform Shiprazor has raised a cool $2.65 million in seed funding from Norrsken22, with AAIC, E4E, Tremis Capital and angel investors participating. Noice.

🙏 ProNutro Says Soz Fam. Iconic SA cereal brand ProNutro had to issue an apology for their “new generation” formulation (which, TBH, SA hated), intended to “cut CO2 emissions, reduce packaging, and decrease water”. At the cost of ruining people’s mornings, though?

👋 Goodbye, Jeeves. After 25 years of answering the world’s questions, Ask.com, formerly known as Ask Jeeves, has shut down. This is as it’s holding co IAC is said to be sharpening its focus. Missed opportunity to launch an LLM called Jeeves that you could, *checks notes, ask…

😂 SA Gov’s AI Be Trippin. Two senior Home Affairs officials have been suspended after AI hallucinations were found in a revised white paper on citizenship, immigration and refugee protection. Eish, right after they had to withdraw their slop draft AI policy. “Yes, you’re absolutely right. Well spotted.”

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Most founders in SA are using AI like a smarter Google: Ask a question, copy and paste in some context, close the tab, repeat tomorrow. So we got one of SA's leading AI implementation specialists in to show us how the pros actually use AI to make growing any type of business easier and faster.

And it turns out, there are 5 specific steps you can use to connect Claude to your business data and unlock business insights like never before.

☝️ Send this to a friend you’d klap with some better data.

The Binance Card is scaling into Africa. You can now spend crypto at millions of Mastercard merchants worldwide, with real-time conversion to local currency at the point of sale. Up to 3% cashback, multi-asset support (BTC, ETH, USDT, SOL and more), and no separate app needed. Check out the Binance Card.

Crypto's next 3 billion users won't come from trading. Binance's latest thesis argues that payments, yield products, tokenised assets and AI integrations are widening crypto's addressable market far beyond exchanges. Stablecoin supply has topped $320bn, monthly on-chain volume hit $7.2 trillion, and RWAs have scaled past $25bn. The super-app era is here. Get all the insights.

Disclaimer: Digital asset prices can be volatile. The value of your investment may go down or up and you may not get back the amount invested. You are solely responsible for your investment decisions and Binance is not liable for any losses you may incur. Not financial advice. For more information, see our Terms of Use and Risk Warning.

Last week, we showed you how Tim Treagus almost gave up just before becoming successful, asking about the hardest part of building a new business. Most here say it’s having to deal with EVERYTHING, all at once…

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💸 Fundraising; the rejections never stop — 8%

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🧠 Finding product-market fit — 18%

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ ⏳ The grind; years before anything clicks — 14%

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤝 Building the right team when you can't afford one — 19%

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 😅 All of the above, simultaneously — 41%

Your 2 cents…

Ha ha, ja Rollit, hard to name a more stressful combo than SA labour law and startup hiring. ⚖️

DevConf JHB – 12 May, Midrand: SA's premier developer conference — 5 tracks, 35+ speakers, one massive day. Get tickets.

Sentech Africa Tech Week – 12–13 May, CPT: Two days of digital transformation strategy, startup investment and future-of-tech panels at CTICC. Register here.

Suits & Sneakers: Only the Brave – 12 May, JHB: Pierre Du Plessis on brave decision-making for founders and leaders. Book your spot.

DevConf CPT – 14 May, Century City: Same energy, Cape Town edition. Get your tickets.

Startup of the Year 2026 – 14 May, CPT: Live pitches, Innovation City Awards and the ecosystem in one room. Save your seat.

Health Entrepreneurship Summit – 15 May, CPT: UCT GSB Bertha Centre hosts a free day on health innovation and social enterprise at the Waterfront. Register free.

AI in Action: How SA Teams Are Really Using It – 4 Jun, CPT: Practical AI demos, a deep panel and great networking at Innovation City. Drinks on us. Get tickets.

🧩 Tool to Try: Photo Poodle rewards guests for taking and sharing photos at your event.

🌍 That's Interesting: Because of time dilation, astronauts aboard the ISS are technically younger than people born at the same time on Earth (even if it's only a fraction of a second).

🏇 Next Level: This weekend, Golden Tempo was dead last in the final turn, then outperformed everyone to win the 2026 Kentucky Derby. What an insane finish.

🎬 Wow Site: Every Cinematic Universe maps out the full timeline and connections of movie universes in glorious detail.