Star struck {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? Erin Brockovich (the real one, not Julia Roberts) has joined the fight against data centres in the US. No jokes, she's launched a website and everything. No word on whether there'll be another movie, tho… 👩‍⚖️

Send this to the friends you wanna re-watch Erin Brockovich with. 🍿

In Today’s Open Letter

SA's top companies have spent years and millions building internal DevOps teams to deploy, secure, and monitor their software, while their best engineers keep getting poached for international remote gigs – this local VC-backed venture says the fix is supercharging the department entirely…

It starts the same way: A venture hits traction, maybe raises a round and suddenly needs infrastructure that won't fall over at 2 AM. So they hire a DevOps engineer (the person who deploys, secures, and monitors your software), then a security engineer and then a site reliability team. 

And before HR can rub their eyes, they've built an entire sub-organisation with nothing to do with what the company actually does.

Globally, there's only one security professional for every 100 developers. In SA, the ratio is likely worse. And with SA being the 2nd most breached country on the continent, the security layer isn't optional, it's existential.

The platform making DevOps a service, not a department

Salus lets companies plug into production-grade infrastructure without building a DevOps team. 

Push code, and Salus handles the rest: Build, secure, deploy, monitor. It’s one dashboard with no manual configuration. An AI layer monitors your live systems, flags errors, surfaces fixes and runs security remediation within guardrails. SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 compliant (internationally recognised security certifications), with multi-cloud deployment across AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

Co-founder and CEO Andrew Mori spent 20 years running engineering teams and 8 years as CEO of Deimos, a bootstrapped cloud consultancy named to the Financial Times' Africa's Fastest-Growing Companies list for 3 years running. 

There, working with SA's top companies, he watched the same pattern on repeat: Companies spending years and millions rolling their own internal platforms. Salus was born from that frustration.

Last year, Salus closed a $3.7 million seed round (roughly R68m), co-led by Atlantica Ventures and P1 Ventures (two of Africa's leading tech investors) with backing from LoftyInc Capital, Zedcrest Capital, Everywhere Ventures and DevSecOps expert Tim Chen of Essence VC. 

And it’s already live with enterprise customers across FinTech and e-commerce.

We're watching this space…

Not every AI problem is a prompt away. Praelexis MD McElory Hoffmann breaks down the full AI stack (ML, deep learning, LLMs) and why knowing which combo fits your business is the key to enterprise AI that actually moves the needle. Read it here.

What if AI could talk like an actual phone call? Mira Murati's Thinking Machines built an interaction model that responds in 0.40 seconds, interrupts naturally and listens while it talks — no more walkie-talkie lag. Watch the demo here.

Want your AI agents to call any enterprise API? MCP Bridge auto-generates tool definitions from any REST, GraphQL, SOAP or gRPC API — typed schemas, auth and rate limiting included — so your agents connect through one standard interface. Try it here.

Springbok loose forward Kwagga Smith walks through a Jonsson Workwear store and walks out with jeans, a collared shirt and a puffer jacket. Not a single overall in the bag.

That's the thing about Jonsson Workwear most SA founders haven't clocked: The brand that's been kitting farmers and builders since 1955 now also stocks the shirt you'd wear to a client meeting and the jacket you'd wear to braai after.

70 years in, 30 stores nationwide and now a proud sponsor of SA’s biggest teams. They do branding on-site and stock sizes S to 5XL, which is why so much SA company kit now walks out of the same shop that kits out Kwagga.

If you're sourcing team shirts from one place, your own wardrobe from another, and a Saturday jacket from a third…

P.S. They're also giving away 100’000 South African Supporter Jerseys right now. Worth a click.

📜 New Rules, Who Dis. Ramaphosa just signed major changes to the Companies Act into effect: Listed and state-owned companies now have to disclose executive pay gaps, get binding shareholder votes on remuneration and delinquent directors can be chased for longer. Governance just got teeth.

🦆 Quack Quack. DuckDuckGo installs are up 30% as users reject being force-fed Google's AI search results. Turns out people still want to find things themselves. Who knew.

🏎️ Prancing Horse, No Noise. Ferrari just unveiled its first electric car. The question that matters: Does it still sound like a Ferrari? (It doesn't. But it looks like one.)

🇿🇦 SA Startups To Watch. Missed what happened in SA tech this week? We've rounded up some of the new ventures raising eyebrows here in SA. Catch up here.

💳 Payments Solved. Selling across Africa means navigating cards, bank transfers and mobile money across 10+ countries. Paystack handles it all on one infrastructure — 99.99% uptime, T+1 settlement and the trust of the continent's biggest brands.*

Most founders who build the wrong thing aren't careless; they're overconfident. They believe in the idea so much that they skip the step where they check if anyone else does. So we brought in an SA UX expert to show us how it's done.

Turns out there are 4 concrete steps to help you be sure you're building the right thing.

☝ Send this to a friend who needs to delight their users. 😍

Yesterday, we showed you the Savant Build Programme, asking about the biggest hurdle facing hardware founders. Most here say capital’s the gap…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 💰 Funding the gap between prototype and revenue (58%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🔩 Manufacturing & supply chain (17%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 👥 Finding the right team (17%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🌍 Getting to market outside the continent (8%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤷 Something else (tell us!) (0%)

Your 2 cents…

Hang in there, Tienie. Most of us build side companies to fund our main ventures these days. Hit up Savant if you’re in hardware. 💪🔩

186 million digital transactions in one month? SA isn't slowing down.

💡 South Africans processed 186.3 million electronic transactions in April 2026, up 11% year-on-year despite a massive fuel price shock hitting household budgets.

💡 March hit 195.5 million transactions, showing digital payments becoming the default layer of daily commerce.

Digital transactions aren't a trend anymore; they're the infrastructure layer. Plug in or become invisible.

🧩 Tool to Try: Signal Engine gives you buying-intent scores, churn risks and expansion signals.

🧬 That's Interesting: Some kamikaze white blood cells fight infections by suicidally bursting open and casting their own DNA like a net to trap pathogens. Your body is hardcore.

🐺 Next Level: Watch a wolf turn into an absolute doggie when reunited with the people who raised him. Also, wolves are huge!

🏛️ Wow Site: Tenochtitlan 3D lets you explore a recreation of the ancient Aztec capital from before the Spanish arrived in the 1500s.