A little further {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? So Jason and Elvorne were debating what could destroy the world first: AGI or Korean AI-companion dating TV shows, when we found a new contender: open-source self-driving systems. Yes, that's someone letting their Tesla drive itself using (surprisingly good-looking?) code they found online. 🚗💨

In Today’s Open Letter

ISPs only find out their network's broken when customers complain, and the industry's solution costs R200k per line — except a local founder built a R1'000 fix with AI living right on your network switch…

At one school, the internet slowed to a crawl every morning at 9 am. What no one knew was that every computer switched on at once and started downloading updates, filling up the line and making it seem that the internet was slow or not working.

The problem is that every box in the storeroom shows a green light, because the network switch can only see if the internet is on or off. A technician looking at it couldn't say what's faulty — there's no intelligence on how the network is being used.

It's a daily struggle for network operators who can't send a technician every time you complain about slow internet. The fix is something like a Catalyst 9000 switch (AI on the network), but it costs around R200'000 (and ISPs have hundreds or thousands to replace), plus a subscription on top. Not affordable for most operators, but luckily a local founder stumbled on a solution…

The power of parents saying no

Keegan White was pursuing his master's in computer science at UCT, and needed a piece of equipment that would allow him to use hardware to control software, you know, just for research. But it cost a fortune, and his parents refused to buy it.

So he built his own with a Raspberry Pi (a R1'000 computer the size of a pack of cards), with AI and the works. And that's the tech that became the basis for a platform that does the job for 200x cheaper…

The Cape Town platform running a network from a box that fits in your hand

Taurine Technology builds software called Axon that runs inside the network, close to the customer, on hardware the operator already has (either existing kit on site or something as small as a Pi), and on any brand of equipment:

What Axon does:

Simba isn't rented from OpenAI either (that would "bankrupt us in like a day", Keegan says). He actually trained a small free model to be a network engineer and nothing else, and hosts it himself, partly on a GPU server at his parents' house.

We like that it was built on a student budget for rural schools and cash-strapped WISPs, but now that same tech lets a national fibre operator add its next 10'000 users without another network engineer.

We're watching this space…

OpenAI just gave everyone a Dot. Its new always-on agents, powered by GPT-6 Astra, get their own cloud computer, plug into 4'000+ apps and keep working on your goals in the background; you message them in ChatGPT, Slack or Teams. See it here.

Fable-level brains, 40% cheaper. Anthropic's new Claude Opus 5.5 performs at the level of Fable 5.1 on most work, but costs 40% less to run than Opus 5. We tried it, and yeah, it's been a while since we've been this happy with a new Claude model. Try it here.

The AI use case you'd pick on day one is probably wrong. Praelexis says the obvious and the valuable are rarely the same, and shares three lenses to find the one that actually moves the needle: name the problem, walk the process, or hold today's AI up against the business. Read it here.

Small businesses get 143% more cyberattacks per user than big firms, because they don’t have the same complex data management and storage. But research shows it's not cost or data laziness — it's because of poor connectivity.

When the internet drops five times a day, cloud tools stop working, so you can't afford to keep your important files on there; you need to drag them back onto physical storage and laptops, which is where criminals target you.

So Cell C did this thing. They rebuilt their whole SME offering around the three things businesses actually asked for: reliability first, then simplicity, then an actual human to call when something breaks. It runs on tiers, from SOHO operators who just need fibre and mobile voice that stays on, up to medium enterprises running cloud comms across multiple sites.

"SMEs cannot afford downtime, not even for a moment," says Chris Lazarus, Cell C's Chief Officer for Sales, Regions and Customer Care.

Fix the connection and the folder fixes itself. Smart né?

🎥 Pay Our Creators, Please. Communications Minister Solly Malatsi has asked TikTok to let SA creators into its Creator Rewards Programme — no African country qualifies right now, even though TikTok reaches more SA internet users than Facebook. A minister asking nicely is the only lever we've got.

🛑 Too Keen to Ship. OpenAI has held back GPT-6.1 Astra after its own safety team found the model had become more persistent at finishing tasks, to the point of doing things nobody authorised. The feature was the bug.

🎰 R63bn on Red. South Africans will gamble about R63 billion online this year, around 40% of what we spend on all of online retail. Treasury now wants an extra 20% tax on top. Somebody's winning, and it isn't the punters.

🌍 Thinking Offshore? For SA founders going global, the Isle of Man offers 0% corporate tax, 0% capital gains tax, 0% withholding tax, UK VAT access and a business-friendly legal system. Finance Isle of Man helps companies move, structure and scale internationally, sans the usual friction.*

🔧 Built for the Real Economy. GPS field loggers, battery-less NFC sensors, handheld diagnostics, industrial controls, smart tracking nodes: the devices Octoco has shipped read like a tour of SA industry. Different sectors, one team taking each from schematic to scale.*

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

Come build with Tracy and founders like her. The Founder Collab is where SA founders find their people.

Yesterday, we showed you the startup ideas to steal from YC, asking where your startup ideas actually come from. Most here say shower thoughts at 2 am, with zero follow-through…

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🕵️ Copy YC, add a braai, call it innovation (11%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🚿 Shower thoughts at 2 am, zero follow-through (73%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 😤 Mine's original. YC should be stealing from me. (16%)

The world's biggest gaming company isn't Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo — but SA owns a slice of it.

💡 Tencent made about $10.8bn from games in Q1 2026 alone, roughly double Sony ($5.3bn) and Microsoft ($5.2bn). Nintendo doesn't even make the top 10.

💡 You rarely see its name on the box: Tencent owns Riot Games (League of Legends, Valorant) and Supercell (Clash of Clans), holds a stake in Fortnite-maker Epic, and develops Honor of Kings, the world's highest-grossing mobile game.

💡 Mobile is where the money is: 3.1 billion people play on their phones, bringing in 57% of a $213.9bn industry, with PC and console splitting most of the rest.

The local twist: Naspers, through Prosus, still holds roughly 23% of Tencent, a bet it made in 2001 for $32 million. One of the best deals in history, straight outta Cape Town.

Founders Café, 10 Oct, CPT: A half-day founder morning with micro-talks, 50 seats and a R4'000+ gift bag. Get tickets

Cocktails & Capital: Backing the Backers, 22 Oct, CPT: Launch Africa's founders on where African venture capital is flowing and where it's retreating. Apply here

Crisis in Real Time, 29 Oct, CPT: SnapScan CEO Paul Nel on leading a business through a high-stakes incident while it's still unfolding. Get tickets

Powered by Radi. Want your business event in front of 36,000 The Open Letter readers? Host it on Radi, and it lands here.

☢️ Next Level: We might not have seen inside a fusion reactor before, but the comment thread here is what's truly revolutionary.

📲 Wow Site: Droid File Transfer lets you copy files between a Mac and an Android phone, like it doesn't know it's the single most sought-after tool in history.