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Not every founding story starts with a pitch deck… 

Some begin with the whirr of helicopters buffeting your tent in an open field in the bush, with generals barking orders and the heavy footfalls of uniformed men checking weapons before deployment. 

With a lonely techie running after them, shouting “wait!”… 

It was two years earlier, during the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, not long after Priaash Ramadeen had joined the CSIR as a software engineer, when his experience in software modelling was called upon. 

The global competition urged SA’s military to invest in ensuring national safety, so Priaash, Shazia Vawda and team were asked if they could use software to model different scenarios (adverse weather, an enemy attack, etc.) on things like helicopters, vehicles, buildings, national key points… The answer was yes, it had never been done at that scale before (this was years before IoT became a thing); the tech was highly experimental, but yes. 

And Priaash and team began using hardware and software to help inform military Command & Control bodies, under the CSIR’s Defence, Peace, Safety and Security division. 

Called to service 

By 2012, when SA’s rhino poaching crisis was at its peak, word had spread about what the CSIR team could do, so an SA Defence general contacted CSIR, asking if they could help with SA’s anti-poaching efforts. 

The team never turned down a chance to test their tech out in the field, so a 20-person team was deployed to the Kruger National Park (Priaash’s first time there). They were setting up their gear in a tent when, amid frantic radio chatter, a helicopter touched down outside, armed rangers preparing to deploy.

It was happening. Poachers had been spotted. They were heading out, right now. 

The team realised they had no way of tracking and gathering data on that chopper, so Priaash did something that would direct their careers for years to come: He ran out to the chopper and asked one of the rangers to take his phone with them. 

The telemetry and data they pulled off that phone paved the way for SA’s Cmore system, an anti-poaching and command and control network that would take 8 years to build and roll out across 100+ game parks. And it still runs to this day. 

Long road to the dining room 

By 2017, Priaash and the team were the “demo people.” Visitors arrived from across government and enterprise. Eskom, Transnet and Defence stakeholders. But then a painful truth was revealed: the work mattered, people depended on it, but the CSIR was not the place for them to create their own vision. For that, they needed the path of entrepreneurship.

At the time, entrepreneurs-in-residence began circulating at the CSIR, coaching scientists and engineers into the startup world (Priaash’s first exposure to entrepreneurship as a craft). So the team did something Priaash calls “very stupid” and resigned cold. 

No investors. No clients. No money. 

It was mid-2018 when they met around the table in their first office (someone’s dining room), surrounded by A3 papers and whiteboards, and The Awareness Company was born. 

Their mission: To build and sell the “Palantir of Africa,” the most advanced real-time situational awareness software possible – that Jurassic Park control room for mines, hospitals, airports, factories, resorts, you name it. 

A leap ahead 

Of course, they did what any team of technical peeps would do when starting new: They built the product first. It was complex, in granular detail, with no market validation whatsoever. But 5 months in, they landed a first client through personal networks: someone would pay upfront for a two-year pilot. 

It was a lifeline, but one lesson began to emerge: You can’t build in the lab; you need to get out there. And in 2019, a few deployments on farms, hospitals and schools and numerous conversations later, they entered startup competitions, placed a few and won an MTN App of the Year award. 

Then came the big would-be inflexion point: The Awareness Company landed a major opportunity to deploy HYDRA at a mine in Botswana. It would be the big showcase, the one that opened all the doors, until… 

COVID hit. Everything froze. The proposal died. And the startup iced out. 

In 2020, a COVID tracking dashboard they’d built (in 3 days)  reached the UN via Microsoft, and they landed a gig for an Africa-wide version, carrying them through that time. But another pain started to show itself: By 2022, they were busy, bringing in around $1 million a year, but it was mostly with one-off and side projects. It was time to focus. 

Realising the vision 

It was time to start building the business they really wanted: A situational awareness tool, SaaS-based, for the physical world. Only problem was, they now needed runway to gain traction. 

So they parallelised. Keep sales moving with recurring customers, while shifting serious effort back into product and fundraising. Let the network effect kick in. 

Most of 2023, they attended events, pitched VCs, but no dice. It took a chance meeting to set them on track again: Priaash pitched to do a masterclass at the South African Innovation Summit. In a session moderated by no one other than The Open Letter’s Renier Kriel. 

“We’d been applying for funding all year, but nothing,” Priaash recalls. “But a few days after I did the How Would You Build It podcast with Renier, I contacted Tramayne from Next176 and, unlike every other investor outreach, he knew exactly who I was. He’d seen me on the podcast.” 

By the beginning of 2025, they were funded and on track. “One insight here: My biggest learnings came from other founders, not books,” Priaash says. 

Building the future 

Today, The Awareness Company is clearer about its focus, customers and the shape of the product. Hydra is live in the field, active on 130 sites around the country. The interface has evolved in ways that reflect how people actually work. 

They started with a mobile app, which makes sense on paper: sensors, GPS, camera. Then they hit reality: people do not want to install or use another app. So, they pivoted the in-field interface to a WhatsApp AI agent, while keeping structured forms in the background of Hydra. WhatsApp stays simple. The system still produces structured outputs. 

And now, AI is changing the next layer too. 

Priaash describes their next evolution as HyAI, a ChatGPT-like interface for sites, buildings, operations and workforce with an emphasis on visual outputs, not just text. Ask for a security incident analysis, get something visual and immediately legible. Generate compliance, sustainability and financial reports, see it, not just read it. Use pre-prompting to turn operational questions into consistent workflows. 

If the first chapter of The Awareness Company was learning to leave the lab, the next is about scaling a product that was forged in the field — and now has to hold up at a national and global scale. 

We can’t wait to see what they do in 2026.

SA women’s fashion and lifestyle brand Poetry are masters of lifestyle storytelling on Instagram and Facebook. Their curated exclusivity and powerful personal stories have always been a winning recipe for driving sales.

So, when Chat Inc came on board with the idea of taking it next level on SA’s No 1 platform for personal connections, WhatsApp, the team were cautiously optimistic — Chat Inc had planned a delightful mix of ways to connect over an upcoming sale.

The results? Targeting 61k SA women, Chat Inc helped bring 14.8k to the shop (24%), resulting in R1.58 million in sales, a 269% return on Poetry’s investment.

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It seems like every company wants to jump into the next shiny AI tool, but you know what rarely gets asked first? “Do we even know what data we have?” Here’s a truth: if you don’t have a clear map of what lives where, you’re launching a rocket without checking the fuel gauge. 

Start by digging through your data estate, spreadsheets, legacy systems, half-forgotten folders, cloud islands, and bring it into one place so you can actually see what you have, how healthy it is, and where it lives. It’s not glamorous, but it’s what separates “look busy” from “get results.”

Because until you know what you’ve got and where it sits, you’re building strategy on guesswork. You can pilot an AI model, but if the underlying data is patched together, you’ll get results… but they’ll be brittle. 

Spend the time mapping your data first. The payoff? Your next investment in analytics or automation works harder, stays relevant, and costs less in rework. Treat discovery and cataloguing not as “nice to have” but as fundamental. 

Know your fuel. Then fire up the engines.

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