Slippery customer {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? If you didn't know, MrBeast beat Usain Bolt in a race, and we have some questions. LOL 👟
☝ Send this to a friend to challenge them to a foot race.
In This Open Letter
IoT Out There: Building off-grid monitoring from the chip up.
Local: Wamly's Series A raise, free AI & SA's gambling crisis.
Global: How to read an ancient scroll charred in a volcano.
Tech Jobs: 6 shiny new SA dev & data roles up for grabs.
Beyond: The hardest thing about scaling your venture in SA.
Work Smarter: How to value your business before you sell.
Need to move faster in your business? 🤖
We trained an AI on SA business — tell it what you're battling with, and it connects you with local resources, providers and tools to help you solve it faster. Still in beta, so your feedback makes it better. 👇
TRENDING NOW
IoT at the Ends of Civilisation
Agriculture uses 60 to 65% of the country's water, losing nearly half of it to leaks, over-abstraction and infrastructure failing in the field where there’s no power and no signal – so this bootstrapped engineer built the off-grid IoT infrastructure to curb it…
SA is running dry, and it doesn’t help that the biggest leaks are out where no one’s watching: A borehole, a reservoir, a pump house kilometres from the farmhouse.
When a pump trips or a pipe splits out there, nobody knows. And there’s no power or network signal, so your off-the-shelf remote-monitoring kit won’t work.
Engineer-turned-founder Henro Ritchie spent two decades in low-level firmware when, one day, someone came to him with a unique problem: Partners in far-flung places were at their wits' end trying to monitor equipment in truly remote sites.
So he did what any self-respecting engineer would do – built his own kit, from the chip up.
Building for where the grid ends
Recon Electronics is building NodeX: Solar-powered field units and an on-site gateway that monitor and control remote sites with no mains power and no signal.
Each unit runs off solar and talks to a base station with LoRa, a radio signal that travels kilometres without a cellular tower. The gateway does the thinking: When a reservoir runs low, it knows to shut off the pump, then syncs to the cloud once a connection is restored.
Henro built the device for the core problem:
For mines, it tracks airborne dust and flags an exceedance the instant it happens; no small thing now that even a first-time breach of the new 2026 dust regulations carries a R5 million fine.
On farms, it watches the reservoir and runs the pumps itself, one gateway carrying up to 500 units.
But soon saw another use case closer to home:
In fast-food kitchens, it cuts loads like geysers and fridges at peak times, shaving the power bill.
Eight years in the field, an MTN IoT award, three live verticals, with every unit built in South Africa. And according to Henro, healthcare and cold chain are next; they’re currently hunting for the funding to scale.
We're watching this space…
Have your say…
CHECK THIS OUT
The team behind the apps you already use
There's a Cape Town studio whose work you've almost certainly touched without knowing the name. Isoflow is a UX and UI design team that has spent 15 years building the products behind Yoco, Luno, Pick n Pay ASAP!, iStore, Coronation, Yuppiechef, Block & Chisel and so many more.
What sets them apart is focus: No development tacked on, no branding on the side. They do one thing: product design grounded in research and data for teams where adoption and conversion actually move the numbers.
As a specialist UX and UI design company, they've earned their stripes to make the complex simple. Functional, user-centred experiences are their core.
The results speak for themselves: A redesigned onboarding flow lifted Sanlam's first-time digital onboarding by 82%. A reworked user journey raised Virgin Active sign-ups by 45%. iStore's app climbed from 2 stars to 4.8 after a rebuild.
The common thread isn’t a surface-level polish. It's closing the gap between a user and the moment they get value, the same gap that makes or breaks adoption.
WORK SMARTER
Found out too late what it’s really worth…
Too many owners never get a valuation until it’s too late to do anything about it. So we got the co-founder of an SA valuation firm that's run thousands of valuations to show us why you need your number years early, and how to use it.
And it turns out, there are 4 specific steps to know what your business is worth long before you ever want to sell.
Send this to a friend who needs to get funded. 💸
IN SHORT
Easing you into the weekend…
🚀 From SOTY to Series A. Wamly, the SA hiring tech founded by Francois de Wet that won Startup of the Year in 2023, has closed its Series A, co-led by Hlayisani Capital and Knife Capital. Three years from SOTY to scale-up. That's the playbook.
📜 Ancient Scrolls, Meet AI. New scanning tech and AI have helped researchers read a papyrus scroll burnt to a crisp during the Vesuvius eruption nearly 2'000 years ago. What’s it say? 20 columns of Stoic philosophy on ethics, art and human behaviour.
🤖 Free AI for SA. Naspers, through Prosus, has launched ToqanClaw, a free Anthropic-powered agentic AI platform for SA businesses: Create apps, dashboards and automations through prompts. Good, considering it's only thanks to Prosus (who owned Stack Overflow) that AIs are useful for tech/coding at all today.
🎰 Gambling Away Retirement. The 2026 Sanlam Benchmark Survey reveals 50% of respondents gambled in the last three months, with 13% dipping into retirement savings to fund it. Just another in a series of reports showing online gambling is devastating SA lives. We need legislation yesterday.
🧭 Last Call: AI Roadmap. R10'000, one hour and a 48-hour report telling you exactly where AI saves your business time and money — yours to keep, whatever you decide to do next. Claim your spot.*
* From our partners. Find all the best service providers for your business in our Founder Stack.
Get the best in SA tech and business news →
WHAT YOU SAID
Now AI see me…
Yesterday, we showed you BrandAxis’ AI search visibility, asking whether you've ever checked what AI says about your business. And it’s a tie…
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🔍 Yes, and I keep an eye on it (36%)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 😬 Once. It rattled me (0%)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤷 Never crossed my mind (23%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 😳 Wait, you can do that? (36%)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🦗 No one's asking AI about my industry yet (5%)
READY FOR A MOVE?
Jobs in Tech
OfferZen proudly sponsors Jobs in Tech
The name in SA tech employment for over a decade, OfferZen needs no introduction, and their ability to get you placed is only as legendary as the time, energy and money they save employers in finding top skills.
BEYOND THE NEWSLETTER
The hardest thing about scaling in SA
We asked an SA founder what the hardest thing about scaling a venture in SA is, and the answer is one of the most sobering reminders every SA founder needs to stamp on their forearm…
Don’t miss all the extra operator interviews and insights content we do on our social channels — come enjoy the vibez.
AROUND THE WEB
Have some fun…
📱 Tool to Try: Hano turns plain screenshots into polished 3D device mockups.
🚫 That's Interesting: Mexico banned cartoon mascots and actors from appearing on unhealthy food packaging in 2021 to combat childhood obesity. No more Tony the Tiger selling cereal to kids.
🍺 Next Level: Watch this Dutch fan carry 26 pints of beer without a tray during the Netherlands' 5-1 win over Sweden.
🧘 Wow Site: Quiet Clarity is a clean, minimalist site that helps you think through difficult situations.
SOUTH OF SERIES A
A slice of SA startup life…
Eek!… our beloved Cape Town startup now only has 4 weeks of runway left to become a unicorn. Will they make it? Find out: There's a new comic strip every Friday, only in The Open Letter.
Got a favourite? Meet all the South of Series A characters here.
☝ Send this to a friend you'd build a startup with. 🦄
