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In Today’s Open Letter

Almost 5’000 South Africans are waiting for a life-saving organ transplant, yet less than 1% of us are formally registered donors. This local venture has a plan to drive medicine into the future…

The bottleneck isn't surgical skill. It's the availability of matched donors. Every cell in your body carries a molecular ID (a set of markers called HLA) that your immune system uses to distinguish your cells from foreign ones. Transplant medicine uses detailed HLA typing to find the closest possible match, though for most solid organ transplants, a perfect match isn’t always required; what matters is close compatibility.

Even with a near-perfect match, patients spend the rest of their lives on immunosuppressants that weaken the immune system over time. As far as transplantation medicine goes, this isn’t the only limitation. 

Where other cutting-edge therapies do exist, they're priced for another planet. In oncology, CAR-T cell therapy, where your own cells are extracted, genetically engineered, and grown from a million to a billion, costs up to R16.5 million all in per patient. 

The process takes four to nine weeks, and some patients don't survive the wait.

Why cracking this in Africa cracks it for everyone

Africa is the most genetically diverse continent on earth, which makes donor-recipient matching harder here than anywhere. But flip that: if you solve the matching problem across Africa's gene pool, you've likely solved it globally.

The local BioTech building for the waiting list

Altera Biosciences is a preclinical-stage BioTech company building a universal donor cell platform: Cells engineered so they can be transplanted into any patient without triggering immune rejection.

Instead of removing parts of genes entirely (the CRISPR approach), Altera uses an approach which dials down the HLA proteins that flag a cell as foreign. This enables a cell line from a single donor to be scaled to treat hundreds to thousands of patients without a traditional donor match.

Founded by Alexandra Miszewski and Professor Michael Pepper, Altera closed a R29 million pre-seed round last year, led by OneBio Venture Studio and E Squared Investments.

BioTech plays by different rules: There is limited market risk but huge technical risk; if you can cure cancer or diabetes, the market exists. The trick, however, is overcoming the technical risk of creating a cure that is safe and effective and that can be scaled. The global cell and gene therapy market sits at nearly ~R600 billion in 2026, heading for ~R4.3 trillion by 2035. 

But the road to revenue is measured in years, not quarters, and outcomes are binary: Your company ends up worth billions, or zero.

With the advent of genetic engineering, Alex notes that many devastating, previously “incurable” diseases will likely have a cure in the next 10 to 15 years, and unless Africa is an innovator of these technologies, and not just a consumer, we'll be left behind.

We're watching this space…

Is your day-one AI use case — gulp — the wrong one? Praelexis CEO McElory Hoffmann says the obvious and the valuable are rarely the same. There are 3 lenses to find the one that actually moves the needle for your business. Read it here.

Is Anthropic's new model actually more honest? Opus 4.8 posted a 69.2% on agentic coding (up from 64.3%), but the real shift is behavioural: early testers say it's far more likely to flag uncertainty and stop confidently making things up. Read more here.

What if an AI assistant just sat next to your cursor? Clicky is a new Mac app that sees your screen, listens when you talk, and spins up background agents on command; its demo went viral with some decidedly "Steve Jobs energy." Try it here.

Most founders run a three-shop wardrobe. Branded shirts for the team from one supplier. Your own jackets from a mall. Weekend gear from somewhere else.

That's three vendors, three invoices and three different quality standards.

Jonsson Workwear collapses all three: 30 stores nationwide, custom branding onsite for company kit, weekend and outdoor gear on the same racks as the overalls that built the business. They've been making clothes in SA since 1955 — that's not marketing copy. Their reputation speaks for itself.

The practical version: Walk in once, leave with team kit getting embroidered while you try on a shirt for next week's pitch, and grab a weekend jacket on the way out.

📦 Prime Time. Amazon Prime just launched in SA: same-day delivery benefits plus Prime Video bundled in for R59/month (down from R79 for video alone). Amazon's unbeatable moat? No other SA retailer can throw in a streaming service.

🏎️ Drift Mode: On. Uber just launched Uber Drift in Tokyo — tandem drifting sessions with Formula Drift licensed drivers in Nissan Silvias at Mobara Twin Circuit. Uber Black transfers included. Meanwhile, in SA, we're still dodging potholes.

📺 DStv's New Boss on the JSE. Canal+ has completed its secondary listing on the JSE, making it the first French company on the bourse — following its takeover of MultiChoice that made it Africa's largest pay-TV and streaming business.

🔋 Battery Swap on the N3. Chinese manufacturer Sany plans to pilot electric truck battery swapping stations on the Joburg-Durban freight corridor. They run the world's biggest pure electric heavy-truck factory — 300'000 units a year. Sounds like a plan.

🤝 Founders Connected. Building in SA is lonely. The Founder Collab is a paid community of ambitious South African founders trading real advice, warm introductions and peer support — for people who want more than advice in isolation.*

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

Everyone wants to have AI, but building it out before you're sure your customers actually want it can be a huge waste of everyone's time and resources. So we brought in an SA UX expert to help us decide on an AI feature.

And would you believe there's a 5-step Wizard of Oz test you can do to know if you need an AI feature or not.

☝ Send this to a friend who doesn't get why no one's using their new feature.

Yesterday, we showed you Uthutho’s taxi tracking, asking how you know when your ride is arriving. But most here don't even use public transport…

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🕐 I just wait and hope for the best (11%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📱 WhatsApp group with other commuters (0%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 👀 I look down the road and guess (6%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🚗 I don't use public transport (66%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤷 I've given up trying to predict it (17%)

SA loses up to R300bn a year because freight that should be on rail is stuck on roads.

💡 16% of iron ore, 12% of coal and 24% of other export mining products are stranded off rail, costing SA between R150bn and R300bn annually.

💡 Road freight has surged from 53.5 million tonnes in 2008 to 78.5 million tonnes in 2026, while rail volumes have barely moved.

💡 11 private train operators have been allocated slots across five corridors, adding 24 million tonnes of capacity, but the target is 250 million by 2030.

The rail fix isn't optional; it's R10-15bn in rehab costs vs R300bn in annual losses.

🧩 Tool to Try: Nanou Studio lets you create personalised bedtime stories for kids.

🎬 That's Interesting: Marlon Brando refused to memorise lines for The Godfather. Crew had to hide cue cards all over the set, including taped to other actors' faces, because he believed not knowing his lines made his reactions feel unscripted.

👐 Next Level: Watch this guy train to become the fastest hands in the world.

🌐 Wow Site: Wikigraph gives you an interactive visualisation of all of English Wikipedia.