Hold still {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? As if we don't have enough to worry about RN, some German scientists say they can now identify people inside buildings with 100% accuracy using any basic Wi-Fi. Starting to get Skynet vibes over here. 💥🔫

In This Open Letter

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among South African women (1 in 27 will be diagnosed with it), and more than half of it is found too late to treat effectively. Except for this one East London radiologist who's working to bring early detection where it's needed most…

SA is bad at early detection (mainly regular mammograms) for 3 reasons:

The practice that bolted the R4-million machine onto a truck

Radhiant is a mobile mammography service that drives a 3-ton truck with the state-of-the-art Siemens 3D machine to the small town church hall, company car park (wherever you need it) for quick 30-minute scans virtually anywhere in SA.

Running off its own batteries means no venue power is needed, and there's a female radiographer, hired locally in each town, who does the imaging, sending it via the cloud to Radhiant's radiologist founder, Dr Anith Chacko, to interpret and report on from East London.

The idea came from the decade spent in his practice watching women arrive from towns 50 to 60km out already carrying a lump they could have caught two years earlier. But the nifty play is how the radiologist (which is the scarce part) stays put, and only the machine travels to where it's needed most.

We like that they use the tech to keep the scarce resource put while only the machine moves. And the touch of hiring a local for the bedside part is a stroke of genius. Jason notes that the app is set up to target consumers directly, but we can definitely see how this scales much faster when targeting organisations, businesses and institutions.

We're watching this space…

PS: From this month through October (Breast Cancer Awareness Month), for every booked and paid-for Radhiant screening, the team will give a free screening to a woman who can't afford it, under their Mammogram Match campaign.

Most people know what's going wrong in their business; they just don’t know what the industry calls it, which makes it hard to just Google and find someone local who can help solve it. So you do… nothing?

Our Founder Advisor is built for that gap: Just describe the problem in your own words, badly, the way you would explain it to someone at a braai. It figures out what category it actually is and points you to the local companies that handle it.

No forms, no demo booking, no lead capture.

Just two minutes and a shortlist of companies down the road you can phone right now.

🛒 Takealot's R1.7m Bet on Local Makers. The Made Local challenge is open, R1m to the winner, judged purely on real sales, not a panel. The prize isn't the cash; it's finding out if your product moves at volume before you bet the business on it.

📸 SAPS Cameras Must Do Facial Recognition. The new body-cam tender makes it mandatory, with no law governing when it runs or whose face it checks. Whatever standards the state sets here become the ones for SA security products.

📉 A SaaS Darling Just Sold for 92% Off. Miro, profitable with $600m in revenue, sold to Bending Spoons for a twelfth of its 2021 valuation. The number that matters isn't $1.36bn. It's the reminder to raise against revenue you can defend.

⛽ We Now Import Half Our Fuel. SA's refining capacity has halved in a decade, adding R76bn to the import bill. Every fuel price is now set offshore in dollars, which makes electrifying the fleet less a green statement, more a balance-sheet defence.

🤖 AI, Implemented. Most companies talk about AI. Few know where to start. Praelexis AI is an advisory and implementation partner that identifies high-impact use cases, fixes your data foundation and builds bespoke ML, predictive analytics and GenAI solutions that actually ship.*

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

Getting that first investor meeting is not an exam on your business: the VC is looking for something more than just your product. We asked one of SA's longest-serving venture capitalists what he's actually watching for.

And it turns out, there are 4 specific things to get right to pass a VC's first meeting.

Someone stole R6 billion in bitcoin, then gave most of it back. Attackers drained 4'000 bitcoin from a smaller network, then handed 3'400 of it back, because every transaction is public and traceable, so a haul that size is almost impossible to spend.

Solana fixed a limit left over from the 1990s. The network was stuck with a tiny cap on transaction size from an old internet standard, and on 9 September it more than tripled it, so a complex payment that used to need three transactions now fits in one.

Smart cities will need smarter money. Binance Research's September insights track tokenised assets and stablecoins moving deeper into everyday finance, exactly the kind of thing many believe Africa's smart-city ambitions will need to be successful.

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 Dreamwork's B2C SaaS playbook, asking what's fuelling your side project. The verdict? An actual problem beats spite (barely)…

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 😤 Pure spite. It's a valid business model (17%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 💡 An actual problem I want solved (66%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💀 Nothing yet, but I'm one meeting away (17%)

Indie Hackers #53, 17 Sep, CPT: Lean-coffee night for people building tech businesses that make money, at MindJoy. Get tickets.

Linda Reddy Book Pre-Launch Dinner, 23 Sep, CPT: Nando's global exec on the unspoken rules that decide who gets ahead in corporate, over dinner at Cape Grace. Get tickets.

FinMaster Friday, 2 Oct, Stellenbosch: Money-themed board game night, buy spaza shops and survive load shedding. 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: Convia Studio turns a single recorded conversation or podcast into a complete multi-channel campaign.

🛍️ That's Interesting: South Korea has a rising trend of dopamine sites: fake shopping apps and food-delivery trackers where you customise orders and track virtual couriers, but nothing is ever delivered or spent. It’s purely just for the dopamine hit.