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In This Open Letter

SA is Africa's new cybercrime hotspot with almost 2'000 cyber attacks per week, but no one can really tell how much it would cost your company if you got hacked, so this team built the tool…

South Africa accounts for 92% of ransomware detection in Africa, 70% of business email compromise detections and 40% of all African phishing. We even wrote the other day that Capitec alone blocked R699 million's worth of bank fraud attempts as digital fraud is on the rise in SA.

But here's the thing: You know you're supposed to put security measures in place, but how much? What's your actual risk? No one can tell you. International reports from IBM say it's around R44.1 million per breach, but what if your entire turnover is only R10 million?

The number's way too arbitrary for an SA business to make actual security purchasing decisions on, so the question stands: How much would a hack actually damage/cost you, so you know how much to spend on security?

The platform that prices a breach before it happens

Üsta (short for Ustahimilivu, the Swahili word for resilience) is a cyber risk quantification platform, essentially turning a company's cyber exposure into a rand figure: Give it your domain, your business exposure and your security controls, and it runs the lot through the same actuarial machinery an insurer would use to price the actual risk.

It'll give you expected annual loss and show you a ranking of security investments that would cut that number, so you know where to put your cybersecurity budget.

Born from an insurance brain

Üsta founder Boris Kouambo is a technical member of the Actuarial Society of SA who spent years building and auditing credit risk models for tier-1 banks before getting a software engineering certificate and building insurance software at a Canadian insurtech. He took one look at SA's virtually non-existent cyber insurance market and developed the product first through a single hand-run engagement with design partner Kasi Money.

The trick here is the insurance thinking: Regulators and clients might require local companies to have insurance against breaches (SA's Joint Standard 2 of 2024 requires companies to define their risk appetite and report it in business terms), but Boris says few executives actually know what cyber cover they have and why.

And, obviously, if companies don't know, insurers don't know how to price accurately either. So Boris' bet is fixing the problem on the pricing end: find a way to give insurers a defensible way to measure a client's risk, and they can write sharper policies.

We like the actuarial approach and truly believe it can help unlock demand from both ends (companies wanting to know, insurers making them find out). And obvs that they built it by hand first with a design partner.

We're watching this space…

Discovery Bank posted its first full-year profit this week, R370m against a R68m loss the year before, with clients up 26% to 1.57 million. That's a bank started from scratch in 2019, inside a company that has been going since 1992, and it took roughly seven years from launch to turning a profit.

Which raises the question most founders eventually run into. How does a business that's 34 years old still find the appetite to start something new, and then hold its nerve through the long unprofitable middle bit?

Barry Swartzberg was there for all of it. He's one of the architects of Discovery and the person who took Vitality global, and, on Thursday 17 September, he's sitting down with us in Sandton to unpack the thinking behind rewards-based behavioural incentives, what it took to scale that model into international markets, and how you build a competitive advantage that holds for decades instead of a quarter.

Also featuring a pre-panel with Sizwe Nxumalo of 3 Capital Ventures on what separates the companies that break out from the ones that stall.

Then drinks, food and 200+ founders, investors and operators in one room, from 17:00 at The Tryst.

Tickets are R250 until 10 September, R350 after that.

A developer kept running into PDFs that no open-source library could handle properly, especially anything with CMYK. So he built his own PDF editor from scratch in Rust with Claude. MIT-licensed, with no existing PDF libraries underneath.

The lekker clever part:

✅ It handles the Ghent PDF test page no other open-source tool does
✅ A dimensioning tool built for architectural and manufacturing drawings
✅ One trillion percent zoom, which he reckons no other PDF editor has

He's going for Acrobat Pro parity, and already prefers his own as a reader.

What's your team building, and where are you hosting it?

Most SA founders take whatever investment is available but miss the fact that the right investors have contacts and experience that can get you further, faster than just money. So we asked an SA founder who built her cap table on purpose how to be more deliberate about who you ask.

And it turns out, there are 4 specific steps to choose investors who bring more than money.

🎣 The Scam Catch-22. A cyberlaw professor says SA needs to spend way more on training law enforcement to actually prosecute electronic crime. Telling people to never share their info, for example, doesn’t work when criminals ask for exactly the same details your bank asks for. Sjoe.

💼 Lowest Remote in Africa. SA has Africa’s smallest share of remote job listings at 17.6%, behind Ghana and Egypt. But the countries topping that table don’t have our formal job market, so it’s hard to pin down how healthy SA remote is.

📱 Switch the Algorithm Off. Australia is tabling draft laws forcing social networks to let users switch off their recommender feeds, with fines over A$100m (R1.15bn). Everyone’s tried to regulate usage; this is the first stab at affecting product functionality. Ooh, spicy.

💰 Your Tax Isn't the Problem. SA's top effective capital gains rate of 18% actually beats the UK, Canada, Australia and the US. Where we get hammered is interest (no inflation indexation, exemptions frozen for years) and a tax-free account capped at just R500k for life. It pays to know what you, as a founder, can actually get taxed on.

🌍 Built for Africa. Most global payments providers weren't built for African customers. Paystack powers online and offline payments across 10+ countries with the local payment methods, settlement speed and conversion rates your customers expect.*

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

Yesterday, we featured The Real Deal discounts platform, asking what your play is with online deals. And this crowd doesn’t take a "sale" sign at face value…

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🛒 See the markdown, add to cart, I don't ask questions (7%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🕵️ I stalk the real price before I believe a single "sale" (79%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🔥 Got burned by a fake discount once; trust no strikethrough now (14%)

Your 2 cents…

Enjoy your new “stalking” tool, Genessa. 🕵️

On 8 September 2003, the Recording Industry Association of America sued 261 people for sharing music on peer-to-peer networks. One of them was 12-year-old Brianna LaHara.

Over time, the legal action ballooned to over 30'000 people, and the plan to scare people off file sharing just created a public backlash against the record industry itself. ‘Cos, you know, suing your own customers turned out to be a not-so-good strategy.

Cape HealthTech Connect 2026, 17 Sept, Cape Town: If you're in, work with or supply healthtech, this is the one room you need to be in this year. From R400. Get tickets.

Founder Padel with Cell C Business, 18 Sept, Sandton: Two hours of padel and founder chat at Discovery Padel Park, capped at 24 players. From R200. Join here.

Buying Back SA Tech from Durban, 1 Oct, Ballito: Gumtree's Pedro Casimiro on why Ignition bought a 25-year-old classifieds brand back from its offshore owner. R150. Register free.

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: Refresh Kiwi turns your old website into a clean, modern design in about two minutes.

🌍 That's Interesting: In Spider-Man: The Animated Series, the hero was never allowed to punch anyone. Producer John Semper Jr. didn't want to teach kids to solve problems with simple violence.