Becoming famous {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? If you missed FlySafair's R12 birthday flight deals this week, don't fret, they inadvertently leaked customer info anyway. Slightly more worrying, Netflorist denies vulnerabilities in their system despite being shown proof. Is that maybe why spam calls seem to increase directly after you've engaged with some companies? 🤷‍♀️

In This Open Letter

South Africa's R225 billion travel and tourism sector still runs on PDFs, spreadsheets and extortionate international SaaS bills – but this local founder duo’s got a plan to help SA operators shine…

Our travel income’s not small: Tourists drop a cool R98.2bn on SA every year, and our domestic market adds another R133.1 billion.

Yet, most local Destination Management Companies (DMCs) employ humans to gather rate sheets (PDFs, spreadsheets or Word docs) from suppliers to manually type rates, policies and levies into the tour operating system.

And when a client asks for a Kruger plus Cape Town quote, someone goes hunting through folders for (probably) last year's rate card – fingers crossed it’s not changed too much.

The software built for this is Australian and priced for enterprise, forcing most smaller SA operators to keep doing it by hand.

Until now.

The local startup bringing calm to travel’s spreadsheet chaos

TourBiddy is a rate management and quoting platform built specifically for South African tour operators and DMCs: Upload a supplier rate sheet (in whatever format), and AI extracts the info into a clean, structured format; and you can build and tweak a quote in minutes. 

Everything from net cost, sell price and margin is visible on every line.

TourBiddy founder Agmad Kafaar told us he got the idea watching his wife (and now co-founder, bringing industry experience) Aalia Ganie struggle with this painful, repetitive admin at her tourism job. 

But getting TourBiddy where it is today wasn't easy

It took three painful pivots (B2C builders will know the pain), first from a consumer booking marketplace to hyper-local experiences, before finally understanding the real problem enough to develop the new B2B software form.

And there are exciting things in the pipeline: Agmad shares a vision of a fully agentic back office, complete with automated supplier confirmations, invoice checks and booking follow-ups. You know, so the people stay, but not the admin. 

We're watching this space…

No founder wakes up one morning and decides to go international.

It creeps up on you.

You start invoicing in dollars while still structured in rands. International VCs keep asking about your holding structure. Your IP (the thing your whole company is built on) sits in a single jurisdiction. And you want to hire across borders, but your entity setup doesn't really support it.

These are the signals that your business has outgrown its original structure.

Going global isn't about packing up and leaving. It's about building the right international foundation so your business can operate, raise capital and protect its assets across borders, while you keep doing what you do best.

If you’re wondering what international readiness looks like, we’ve got some friends in Europe who can help talk you through it.

💸 We Like To Move It. More than 8.2 million peeps in South Africa used FNB’s eWallet to move around R43 billion between them in 2025, with 1.5 million transactions happening every month, allowing folks without bank accounts to access financial services. That’s MEGA.

🧦 Getting Comfy On Your Hard Drive. Google is apparently downloading a 4GB on-device AI model file, weights.bin, to computers running Chrome, without users' consent or the ability to decline. Even removing it doesn't help; Chrome redownloads it. What The Heck?

🖥️ Altron’s Earnings Surge. One of SA’s oldest tech companies is expected to release earnings increases approaching 87% this year. 61 years old, Altron provides tech solutions to half of the top 100 JSE-listed companies. Very nice.

🥷 Have Hackers Leaked Your Accounts? South Africa has just ranked the 38th most breached country with nearly 212’700 account breaches in Q1 of 2026. While it only makes up around 0.2% of all breaches worldwide, we do see around 70 breaches per 100 people. Whoa.

💳 Africa's Payments Giant. Africa's largest payments company isn't headquartered in San Francisco; it's right here on the continent, processes payments for 200'000+ businesses, and SA founders can use it without opening a US entity. More on Paystack next week →.*

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

Get more SA tech and business news →

Yesterday, we featured PropelMapper's agri advisors operating system, asking how your business captures what your best people know. Turns out most of you… don't.

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📋 We got proper systems and processes in place (13%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🗣️ Mostly verbal — it lives in team convos (6%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📓 Notes and spreadsheets held together with hope (13%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🤷 Honestly, we don't — it just lives in people's heads (50%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🌱 We're actively working on fixing this right now (18%)

💻 Frontend Developer (Angular)

🎓 Graduate Software Engineer

📋 Product Owner

🧠 Data Engineer

🔌 DataOps Engineer - Product Owner

🤖 Senior SDET

We asked the founder of one of SA's most exciting new niche sports stores what skills you need to build a commerce business — the answer is pure 🥇…

Don’t miss all the extra operator interviews and insights content we do on our social channels — come enjoy the vibez.

🧩 Tool to Try: Today's main feature founder Agmad also built MosaicBox, a 100% private, browser-based tool that turns your photos into a mosaic of one special photo; hundreds of everyday snaps mosaiced into your wedding photo, for example.

🐝 That's Interesting: When Notre Dame burned in 2019, the 180'000 bees kept inside the cathedral all survived the fire because bees don't have lungs, so the smoke just put them to sleep.

🍺 Next Level: Flashback to when the "World's Chillest Man" just casually kept sipping his beer while a gunman robbed the bar around him.

🌳 Wow Site: Treerecipes converts text recipes into clean visual trees that are actually easy to follow.

This Cape Town startup is not quite a unicorn – yet. But they’ve got 12 weeks' runway to try and get there. Will they make it? Find out: There’s a new comic strip every Friday, only in The Open Letter.

Got a favourite? Meet all the South of Series A characters here.

☝ See how to send this to a friend you’d build a startup with. 🦄