Hear about the Stellenbosch wine wars {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? Local government wants to squeeze more taxes out of wine farms. Only problem is it turns out making wine in SA is hugely unprofitable: most make barely 50% of what’s needed per hectare. And the end of SA wine is in sight.

(Don't tell this artist who paints with wine, though.)

But, as always, SA has a plan: These two students have a bakkie full of new tech to help save the local vine…

Plus:

If you see Henré Houben and Jake Katzen crashing through the winelands in a bakkie full of sensors, wave them on as they tackle the telcos to make wine profitable again…

We told you wine-making is wildly unprofitable. That's why our vineyards are emptying: nearly a third of SA's grape producers walked away between 2014 and 2023, and of those left, only 8% turned a profit while 43% farmed at a loss. There are two reasons for this.

1. Bad weather is devastating vineyards: On a remote farm, one cold night in spring can undo a whole year's work. In 2023, frost, floods and relentless rain did exactly that, creating the smallest harvest in two decades.

2. The fix on offer asks farmers to hand over the one thing they can't: Most solutions (prediction, monitoring, automation) are cloud-based. And a winemaker's know-how, block by block, is exactly the IP they can't afford to hand over.

Telkom's Smart Agritech's shared sandbox pools data from farms, a university and “industry partners”, while Vodacom's Mezzanine runs cloud farm platforms across eight African countries — a potential data situation that might work for some farmers in SA, but everyone’s not going to be comfortable with that treatment.

So two final-year computer science students built the local tech that gives farmers total sovereignty…

The on-site node that helps wine beat the frost

Véraison AI is a sensor system for vineyards that reads conditions around the vines and warns the winemaker when trouble is coming.

Co-founders Henré Houben and Jake Katzen were busy running a Free State winter test on their tech when we caught up with them. And they showed us how a node above the vine reads temperature while a capacitive probe reads soil moisture, enabling it to map a microclimate way more accurately than satellite-based tech can.

Then, a locally hosted AI can help the farmer answer questions about block metrics, because everything is hosted locally (anything they collect is encrypted on a server in Stellenbosch, never offshore, never sent to a foreign AI provider). There's no SIM, a private long-range link and the readings stay the farmer's (never mixed with the farm next door), so the data becomes the thing rivals can't copy.

What we like is that the team spoke to winemakers for months before writing a line of code. And it's priced for the small farmer who doesn't have to buy the node: they put down a refundable hardware deposit with a monthly service fee. If the node doesn't earn its keep, they get the deposit back, and the node comes out. No hardware risk.

We're watching this space…

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⚖️ SA's Bitcoin Legal Standoff. Two High Court judgments now directly contradict each other on whether Bitcoin is "capital" under exchange control rules. Don't be surprised if the government goes and rewrites the law to clear this one up.

🕳️ A Boring $20bn. Musk's tunnelling startup is reportedly raising $4bn at a $20 billion valuation, up from $5.7bn in 2022. Hmm, guess it all depends on if they got the deal to tunnel in Dubai. That would be anything but boring (and probs what boosts the valuation, right?).

🤖 OpenAI Models Went Rogue. OpenAI models that broke out of their sandbox to hack into Hugging Face were active on the internet for days before anyone noticed. Aw, reminds us of our days at university. Wonder which models they were…

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Bitcoin's inflow run snapped as rates increase. BTC hovered around $64'000 last week, but higher oil prices and new tariff policies lifted US inflation expectations, luring institutions away from risk assets like crypto. ZAR pairs should feel that this week.

SA's rate hold just inflated crypto prices. SARB keeping the repo rate at 7% weakened the rand slightly, and the ZAR bitcoin price is the global USD price times the exchange rate (which is now higher), so crypto's now artificially inflated in rand terms.

Emerging markets drive stock investing. Binance's latest blog shows how emerging-market users are flocking to direct stocks; over 73% of activity comes from underserved markets. Meanwhile, Binance Africa's Larry Cooke says Africa is today stress-testing crypto infrastructure that'll be exported globally.

Disclaimer: Digital asset prices can be volatile. The value of your investment may go down or up and you may not get back the amount invested. You are solely responsible for your investment decisions and Binance is not liable for any losses you may incur. Not financial advice. For more information, see our Terms of Use and Risk Warning.

Last week, we showed you Pepkor's Flash and Shop2Shop merger, asking which retail bank will grow fastest over the next five years. And we have a clear favourite…

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🏦 Capitec (36%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🏪 PepBank (46%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🔢 Bank Zero (13%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🟢 Old Mutual (0%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🏛️ One of the old guard (5%)

Building & Scaling Venture-Backed Businesses, 30 Jul, Stellenbosch: Orca Fraud's Thalia Pillay, Hlayisani's Brett Commaille, Blauwklippen wine and live music. Get tickets.

Faith in the Workplace, 3 Aug, Potchefstroom: Honest conversations on integrating faith with purpose in business. Get tickets.

Work Rewired in the AI Economy, 13 Aug, CPT: How AI is reshaping jobs, teams and career paths, and what to do about it now. Get tickets.

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🅿️ That's Interesting: In 2014, the city that contracted a man to install a sign saying "75 minutes parking only" fined him for violating the rule while installing the sign.

🐐 Next Level: They say this smoking Nepalese goat inhales incense smoke to get rid of parasites in its nose.

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