Crack shot? Last week, a Ukrainian soldier broke the world sniping record, hitting a target 4km (previous was around 3km) away using drones (for targeting) and AI (to help calculate vectors). Great tech, but we’d prefer it if there were no wars at all. 🥺

In This Open Letter

Rougly 21 million in SA are under 18, and they’re learning money skills from a generation of highly pressured adults – this startup’s got a plan to get them (and parents) financially sound…

70% of SA adults struggle with financial anxiety caused by incomes not keeping up with the rising costs of food, electricity and petrol. Record numbers are turning to debt to make ends meet, with the average SA spending 69% of their take-home pay servicing debt. 😬

And if you think it’s a problem now, just wait until our 21 million children under 18 (34% of the population) grow up with these bad financial habits from mom and dad. Fully half of SA adults are financially illiterate, so who’s going to teach them to do things better?

A vital gap to bridge

Initiatives like Fintr’s Finmaster board games and the mini-millionaires newsletter are approaching the problem from one perspective – making money skills fun.

But something else is happening around schools that needs an entirely different approach: Physical cash, a tangible teaching tool for the longest time, is vanishing from our lives. Even some SA bank branches are going cashless, mirroring our move towards digital payments. 

Contactless cards, mobile wallets and invisible transactions are the norm, making it harder for young people to connect effort with value and spending.

Schools are now pressured to keep up with cashless operations for security and efficiency, but how do we ensure our solutions don’t just breed a generation of mindless “tap to pay” zombies who can’t think before they do so?

The local startup handling payments and teaching money skills

Sticitt is a local startup approaching the whole teaching money skills thing from a FinTech product angle, with a two-sided platform for schools: 

1: A payment infrastructure that integrates with tuck shops, uniform stores, ticketing, vending and more. This solves the parents’ pain point of sending kids to school with cash (or a bank card you can’t monitor) by giving them a safe alternative way to take money to school.

2: A youth banking product that lets kids manage their own account under a parent mode with every feature designed to encourage six core money habits: Earning through Value-adding work to Reviewing purchases, Budgeting, Saving and Giving.

We caught up with Theo Kitshoff, co-founder of Sticitt, and they’re already in 450 schools, but the bigger play is generational. Kitshoff’s bet is that embedding financial literacy in everyday spending can shift upward mobility over the next 10–15 years. 

If he’s right, the most important thing about a R20 tuck shop swipe will be the habits it builds.

We’re watching this space.

Win R300k in prizes for running an excellent SME. That’s right, Lula and News24 are giving away R300k in prizes in the inaugural SME excellence awards. All you need to enter is a 12-month track record and annual turnover of R500k+. More details here.

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Want to get your brand mentioned by AI? Profound helps you get your company mentioned by ChatGPT more often, plus analyse, optimise and track how often your company appears in AI answers, see which sources power those mentions, and create AI-optimised content that gets surfaced more often. Get started here.

Why should only big brands have power WhatsApp tech?

Most new and small businesses don’t have time to sit through demos or figure out clunky enterprise software. You’ve got products to ship, customers to talk to, and zero patience for red tape.

But what if you could just… start?

That’s why flEX by Chat Inc is such a game-changer — the first pure SaaS WhatsApp marketing platform in South Africa. No subscriptions. No platform fees. No gatekeeping.

✅ You sign up.
✅ Connect your WhatsApp channel.
✅ Add credits and start sending.

It’s that simple.

Whether you’re a boutique store, local brand, or solo founder, flEX gives you the same broadcast and automation tools the big brands use — without needing a whole IT team to run it.

🏆 Big Leagues. Local AI accounting software startup Fintura was crowned the SA-leg winner of the 2025 Startup World Cup. This means they’re headed to Silicon Valley to battle it out against 100+ other regional winners from around the world for the grand trophy and $1M in funding.

🚰 Splashing Out. A whopping $10 billion+ has been committed to 80 water projects across 38 African countries at the recent Water Investment Summit in Cape Town. Nice one.

🚁 Flying Taxis. Joby Aviation’s flying taxi made history with its first public airport-to-airport flight, soaring 18.5 kilometres in just 12 minutes over California. This marks a playful step toward commercial flights, hinting at future rides in style. Very cool.

📱 Blast From The Past. BlackBerry is back, thanks to a Chinese company's modern makeover, and you can snag one locally for just R7’300. These retro phones now run Android with specs like MediaTek chips and 12GB RAM. Anyone got a BBM pin to share?

🧘 AI Welfare. Anthropic announced that its latest Claude models now have the savvy to shut down “abusive chats” to protect the AI itself. This protective feature kicks in during extreme cases. AI standing up for itself is a plot twist we didn't see coming!

✅ The Stack. Founders need reliable tools and suppliers. That’s why our Founder’s Stack gives you full-funnel tech performance marketing by Stream, hardware, software, acceleration and funding for remarkable builds with Octoco and loads more vital startup tools & services.

Yesterday, we showed you how Street Wallet is using QR cards to get SA vendors deviceless digital payments, asking about the last time you paid someone in cash. And most have kissed cash goodbye…

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💵 Every single day – cash is king (18%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🏖️ At least once a week (14%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📅 I remember vaguely once… (19%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤔 What is this “cash” you speak of? (16%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🙅 I don’t do cash anymore (33%)

Your 2 cents…

Ah, nice one, Charles. Now there’s a market we didn’t even think of. ⛳

On 19 August 2004, Google held its first Initial Public Offering (IPO), selling 20 million shares at $85 each to raise $1.67 billion and reach a market cap of $23 billion. It was a good move as the online advertising market kicked off and the company increased profits by 700% in 2005 and raked in $10.492 billion in total advertising revenues in 2006.

By 2007, those same shares were worth $350 each, and they went on to generate $50 billion in annual revenue by 2012. In 2015, Google was reorganised as a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., and is still the holding company for almost all of Alphabet's internet properties. Today it’s market cap is at a staggering $2.47 trillion.

🛠 Tool to Try: NowAgo is a slick habit tracker for iOS/macOS with custom timers, milestone tracking, deep insights and no account required.

🤔 That’s Interesting: Incredibly, some IKEA items are cheaper today than they were in 1985.

🔥 Next Level: Standing this close to a Komodo dragon is both terrifying and mesmerising.

🍔 Hack: Can’t sleep from racing thoughts? Try writing yourself a note to deal with it tomorrow instead. It gives your brain permission to rest.

🌐 Wow Site: KeyBegin is a clickable 108-key keyboard that explains what every key does.

We are always keen to get reader feedback to help make The Open Letter the most useful of its kind for you. So please select