Something for the holidays {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? Local founder Omar Kinnear built a simple tool for turning your photos into fun, printable art projects to share with the fam this December. Looks fun, nê?

In Today’s Open Letter

SA came in dead last out of 59 countries for maths and science, and tutors cost an average of R258 an hour – so this local founder built an accessible study app to supercharge SA education…

Remember last week when we told you SA's engineers are in trouble? Well, the education system starts failing students much earlier than university level:

And with tutors costing around R258 an hour, just two sessions a week easily racks up R2'000+ per month, about 10% of SA's average household pay. 😬

A father's firsthand pain

One SA dad who knows this pain all too well is founder Hex Novoa. After 18 years in the SA Navy and an MBA and some moves in FinTech, Hex noticed an opportunity closer to home: his Grade 5 daughter had a rough first term. Her marks and confidence slipped, and one night at 8 PM, when he couldn't face another isosceles triangle, he had an epiphany…

The slipping marks weren't the problem – her method of study and focus was what needed fine-tuning. So, over the April holidays, Hex and his kids built a kid-focused learning tool, using their designs, Hex's architecture planning, Claude's coding and the kids' troubleshooting.

Three weeks into the new term, the school sent Hex and his wife an email to say his daughter was a completely different person in class. And Hex knew he was onto something…

The study app half his daughter's grade found by word of mouth

Studywork is a tutor and exam-prep app for Grades 3 to 7, built on the CAPS curriculum and covering every subject for just R200 a month.

Every session opens with a breathing exercise to set focus, and flashcards and questions are read aloud, while kids can type, talk to the tutor or photograph their written work. Questions are fresh, and each session works across CAPS's low, middle and high thinking levels, so kids have to apply and explain, not just remember.

Click this to try it yourself 👇…

Every question has been checked by a teacher or student teacher. Parents get a report after every session, with questions to ask on the drive home, and there are guided sessions for homeschooling parents and coding and robotics as an opt-in subject.

No wonder that, within the same term, more than half of his daughter's grade was on Studywork too – by word of mouth alone. Since then it has gone paid, and every CAPS grade from 3 to 7 is live.

What we like is that Hex intentionally built it so that the tutor doesn't hand over the answer but fosters the deep learning and thinking that flashcards alone skip. And that it's safe by design: the tutor steers everything back to the schoolwork, and a child who opens up is pointed to a trusted adult and Childline, never counselled by an AI.

We're watching this space…

A robot dog just solved a giant Rubik’s Cube with its feet. ETH Zurich researchers taught a four-legged robot to scan, plan and solve a 40cm cube, pinning it with one foot and turning the layers with the other. Three solves, about 30 moves each. See it here.

Google’s new Gemini wants the job you keep putting off. Gemini 4 Argon is Google’s new top model for multi-step work. In one demo, it turns an untidy folder of project files into a client proposal deck. See how it works.

Is a plumber’s job now safer than a lawyer’s? Praelexis strategist Johan van der Merwe says yes: this AI wave hits computing, admin, finance and law hardest, not the trades. His advice is to stop asking if AI will take your job and start asking what you’ll be accountable for. Read it here.

There’s a line item in your accounting that nobody ever negotiates, and it gets more expensive every time the rand has a bad week.

The maths is frickin’ brutal: A $49 seat on an international SaaS product, five users, billed monthly, is roughly R70,000 a year before anyone has done a single thing with it. Then the card you pay with gets docked a forex fee, and the invoice arrives in a format your accountant has to reformat (costing you even more).

Meanwhile, there is usually a local equivalent priced in rands, billed in rands, and built by people who already know what a SARS deadline does to a finance team in February.

We know, ‘cos we keep a list of the SA companies worth working with: accounting, payments, cloud, legal, workwear, CFO help, funding — you name it, we got it.

🏆 Jem Takes the Trophy. WhatsApp-based HR platform Jem just won Best HR Industry Innovation at the 2026 Future of HR Awards, for building for security guards, factory and retail staff. Free for employers, with 250'000+ workers on it. Well deserved.

🎵 Declare Your AI. SAMRO now wants musicians to disclose AI use when registering songs, but sets no minimum for human input. An AI-made amapiano track has already hit #1 on Apple Music SA. Keep records of your process.

⚖️ Why 50? Anthropic is shopping a draft US AI safety bill that would only let a judge halt a model's release if it risks 50+ deaths or about R16.5bn in damage. Our only question: isn't one death enough?

💳 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.*

🚚 Plan for Next. Strong logistics starts with strong planning. TFS Consulting brings deep operational expertise to logistics strategy, from network design to growth planning, so you build for where your business is going next.*

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

Come build with Hex and founders like him. The Founder Collab is where SA founders find their people, with weekly accountability, honest feedback, and people who've been where you are.

Yesterday, we showed you how Happy Ads lets e-commerce brands pay for ads only when they make a sale, asking if you'd rather pay that way. Most here say pay-per-sale, all day…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🙌 Yes, pay-per-sale all day (81%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤔 Depends on the commission (19%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 😅 My Meta ads have never sold a thing anyway (0%)

Your 2 cents…

Def, Shaun, but we're pretty sure they'll be upfront about coms — just ask. And if it brings sales you wouldn't have had otherwise, that's a different story entirely (mark the price up slightly to cover comms, maybe?). 💸🛒

90% of SA small businesses fund themselves, but only 4.4% want to.

💡 More than 90% of the 800 businesses surveyed fund themselves. Around 14% lean on family or friends, nearly 10% use bank loans, and just 3% have grants or private investors.

💡 Ask what they'd prefer, and it flips: private investment tops the list at 46.2%, then bank loans (23.5%) and government grants (22.5%). Only 4.4% would choose to self-fund.

💡 70.8% say funding would make them more competitive, yet 57.4% have never applied. 10% target CSR money, but fewer than 1% actually get it.

For anyone building in SME finance: the demand is there. The gap is that most owners have never even made it to the application.

🧩 Tool to Try: Gantry is a shared dashboard for recurring household tasks, from the dentist run to oil changes. Waiting list for now.

🗼 That's Interesting: Gustave Eiffel kept a small apartment near the top of his tower, complete with wallpaper and a piano. He turned down Paris's elite and hosted only a select few, like Thomas Edison. It's still there but closed to the public.