Building your company {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? Renier and Jason flew up to Joburg this week, and the first stop was hosting a lekker dinner with some of our fave Gauteng business-builders who could make the trip out to Sandton…

If you want R40k's help building your company, 40+ hours of founder skills and playbooks, plus weekly catchups, masterclasses and tools to help you succeed (not to mention a seat to lekker special events like this one), join our community, the Founder Collab.

In Today's Open Letter

SA's public universities can take only 235k, yet schools churn out 245k candidates per year, making the fight for a spot at uni an ordeal, 'cept this startup’s giving school-leavers a leg up…

The competition to get into your best-known (and located) universities is beyond stiff:

That's a lot of prospective students vying for a single seat…

And that's not even the hard part: Every uni has a separate portal for applications; they all calculate Admission Point Score (APS) differently, use their own jargon and complex forms. Miss one box or misread one requirement and you're outta there (even if you're actually qualified).

SA's real uni gap

Now for the sore part: Most of us might be able to navigate the application just fine, but when UCT undergrad Thando Mzimela-Ntuli volunteered to help township students apply to university, he was shocked to find how complex it was for them. Many had never owned a laptop and did not speak English first. One wanted to be an
accountant purely because it was the only career he had a word for.

So Thando thought: What happens to these kids when the volunteers pack up their laptops and go home?

He knew this could be a product/business, but tested it first with a team sitting there and helping kids do their applications for R120. Demand increased, so they upped it to R300. But when application season peaked, they couldn't keep up. It was time to build this into something scalable…

Making uni applications as easy as texting your cousin

The result is Univio, a free AI guidance assistant that lives inside the app almost everybody already uses, WhatsApp. And the flow is intentionally simple: Enter your subjects and marks once, and it calculates your APS for every university, shows you the degrees and bursaries you genuinely qualify for and why, runs a career quiz, and takes your questions in isiZulu, isiXhosa or English.

The larger opportunity: Univio collects the data on who matches which bursaries, which is something funders and institutions probs want access to. We like how they're mapping a system built to lose people.

We're watching this space…

Shoprite grew 7.1% by selling more, not by charging more. Their SA supermarkets hit R228.7 billion for the year to June, but not by hiking prices: they added 5.6% more volume and 5.3% more customers. Of course, it doesn't hurt that Sixty60 added R25.5 billion, up 34.5% (3.5x the growth of the rest of the market). See the numbers.

OpenClaw 2.0 is out and now easier to use. OpenClaw 2.0 landed on Sunday with guided setup that detects your existing ChatGPT or Claude subscription, a rebuilt browser app that opens straight into a conversation and memory that carries context across sessions. Read the release notes.

R50 a month for a business account you open from your phone. Capitec Business opens online in a few minutes, with the card couriered to your door and R150 in the account keeping it active. Free 24/7 online banking and the app handles the day-to-day. Open yours online.

☕ Shoprite Bought A Coffee Chain. Their latest results show they bought Vida e Caffè, with 400+ stores, as well as R&A Cellular, which has about 15'000 payment terminals in the informal market. More spaza till moves.

🏦 Capitec Is Listing On A2X. Its secondary listing is approved, and though the JSE stays its primary, the group did change its name a week earlier. And there’s some reason to believe that Capitec might be up to big things.

🛰️ Wanna Invest In Mankind’s First Interstellar Mission? Fermi Explorer, the company behind the data centres in space idea, wants to launch a 1kg spacecraft toward Alpha Centauri in 2029, for R243m. The trip will take about 80'000 years, so don’t expect a return anytime soon.

⚡ Cape Town Is Buying Power Cheaper Than Eskom. The city signed two 20-year deals for R8bn of electricity, 19-21% below Eskom’s current rates, making it SA’s first metro to buy on the open market. But the discount isn't even the clever bit; there’s a smart escalation clause you should see.

💳 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.*

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

We featured Clicks' township rebrand and asked which retailer is quietly running your monthly budget. And most here say Checkers has their card details and their dignity…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🛒 Checkers has my card details and my dignity (76%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💊 Clicks, and I only went in for one thing (10%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🏪 The spaza on the corner, and honestly? Better prices (14%)

You'll be surprised how many founders discover a gap in what they think they own halfway through due diligence. So we asked an SA IP lawyer what every company should actually have in place.

And he gave us 5 specific steps to actually own your venture's IP.

SME doing between R0 and R50m? Shell LiveWire's 2026 Enterprise Development Programme offers coaching, systems assessments, market access and funding-readiness support. Closes 9 Sep. Apply now.

Builder who wants 24 hours and a deadline? Builders Table's inaugural hackathon puts 100 people in Woodstock on 18 to 19 Sep for a R50'000 prize pool, and every team keeps full ownership of what they build. Pre-register.

Need more than just advice? The Founder Collab bundles R40k+ in tools, cloud credits, legal sessions and a curated founder community into one membership for SA tech builders. Join now.

Want free AI skills training? Google Hustle Academy 2026 offers one-day bootcamps and 60-min webinars for SA entrepreneurs and SME owners. Register for free.

SA small business ready for the national stage? NSBC Small Business Awards are open, free entry for NSBC Platinum Members across 4 categories including Startup Champion of the Year. Gala on 12 November. See details.

Coffee Rave @ Innovation City, 3 Sep, Cape Town: Caffeine, music and the CPT startup crowd before 9 am. Register for free.

FinMaster Friday, 4 Sep, Stellenbosch: Sharpen the finance side of your business over one morning, from R50. Get tickets.

Startup Stories: Altera Biosciences, 14 Sep, Cape Town: The founder story behind the science, told over lunch for R50. 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.

🧩 Tool to Try: YappJam is multiplayer vibe coding; your entire team building the same thing.

🛰️ That's Interesting: NASA lost contact with a spacecraft for over 12 years, then an amateur astronomer rediscovered its signal in 2018 and told them where to look for it.