You don't have to run an AI company to do interesting things with AI. The five founders below are building payments infrastructure, HR platforms, safety apps, software consultancies, and property search tools. What connects them is that they're all tinkering with AI in ways that go beyond the obvious, some inside their core business, some on the side, some just because they could.

Kiaan Pillay is the co-founder and CEO of Stitch, the payments infrastructure company that recently acquired card processor Efficacy Payments to offer end-to-end card acquiring without a bank dependency. But the most interesting thing he did recently was hand his LinkedIn to an AI agent called Jade.

Jade isn't a chatbot. She's a custom agent with a Takealot integration running on a dedicated machine. She introduced herself to Kiaan's professional network, then immediately aired his business: 103 Takealot orders, of which 73% was supplements, plus his mouth tape habit. 

Co-founder Junaid Dadan's agent Gort responded with a strategic breakdown of what merchants need for a world where agents transact on behalf of customers. Then CTO Priyen Pillay's agent Arc described how agents are compressing Stitch's entire software development lifecycle. Three co-founders, three agents, one live case study in agentic commerce.

Michael Houghton co-founded Community Wolf, a WhatsApp-based safety platform that uses NLP to classify, geolocate and map crime reports in real time. The company recently acquired emergency response app Namola.

Alongside the core business, Michael has been building what amounts to an AI-native team. He runs eight agents across three machines, each with specific roles, inboxes, and filesystems. 

One agent, Corey, handles content, checking in each morning and drafting social posts from real business activity. Another, Nexus, exists solely to maintain the agent system itself. Michael didn't plan Nexus. It made itself useful. He's spent close to a billion tokens getting here, running on Claude and GPT models through Cursor Ultra. 

His team policy: everyone gets a full Cursor Ultra and Claude Max allocation. If you don't burn through it, that's not frugality. It's a waste.

Simon Ellis co-founded Jem, a WhatsApp-native HR platform serving over 150’000 deskless workers across security, mining, retail, and logistics. The company raised $3.3 million this year, led by Old Mutual's Next176.

Simon's AI story isn't a side project or a weekend experiment. It's a company-wide operating shift. Every employee at Jem is expected to be AI-native. The company builds one new AI agent per day. 

Simon runs a weekly "AI Power Hour" that has become something of an industry event, with external founders and CEOs attending to see how Jem operationalises AI across every function. CEO coach Greg Solomon, who attended a recent session, wrote afterwards that it opened his mind. 

Jem no longer signs annual software agreements because the tools change too fast. Monthly company-wide AI demo sessions, where each team presents the agents they've built, have become a forcing function for adoption.

Heinrich de Lange co-founded Octoco, a Stellenbosch-based software engineering consultancy that has expanded into a group including Polymorph Systems and Octoco AI. He recently stepped back from the CEO role, not to slow down, but to go deeper. 

He's now full-time as MD of the Octoco Group, focused on new ventures, hands-on projects, and pushing agentic systems across all the group's businesses.

The group recently co-hosted a 150-person AI conference in Stellenbosch with Capitec and AWS, where one of their engineers built an AI-powered photobooth entirely through agent-augmented coding, with the primary human effort going into prompt tuning. Heinrich's co-founder described the current moment as having more "founder energy" than since they first started Octoco. 

His background, for what it's worth, includes electronic engineering at Stellenbosch, multiple CTO stints and a previous life as a breakdance instructor.

Adrian Bunge is the founder of FindHomes, an AI-powered property search platform. It replaces filter-and-checkbox search with natural language, analyses listing photos so homes with spiral staircases or veggie gardens become discoverable, and layers in deeds data and bond cost estimates.

But Adrian's most recent move is what earns him a spot here. He's been experimenting with OpenClaw, a tool that connects AI to channels like WhatsApp and email to take real actions. 

He's running two instances: one for FindHomes as an agentic property search (C-suite buyers who saw the demo said it felt less like an interface, more like a colleague), and one for Hydroland, a hydroponics e-commerce side project where OpenClaw handles supplier sourcing, stock replenishment, Shopify updates and dispatch. 

His framing: not building software that people use, but building systems that operate.

What connects these five is a disposition. They suggest something about SA's founder culture that doesn't show up in funding rounds: there's a layer of tinkering happening, fast, creative, personal, that moves ahead of the official AI narrative.

The honest question is whether tinkering translates. Every founder on this list has an existing business, revenue, a team and the resources to experiment, yes.

But the next test for SA isn't whether funded founders can play with AI. It's whether the capital, technical depth and community infrastructure exist to help the next wave of founders, the ones without those resources, cross the line from experiment to product and from product to scale.

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This news first appeared in our 8 April edition on Social Light media monitoring in SA.

Read where Africa stands on AI adoption and what South Africa's AI adoption looks like in 2026. See more on WhatsApp Business in South Africa and meet more Stellenbosch founders shaping SA’s tech scene.

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