A couple of kinks {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? A woman excited to receive her first Amazon Prime Air drone delivery swore out loud when the drone dropped her package in the pool. Send a submarine to fetch it, LOL. 🤿

In This Open Letter

Digital banking fraud climbed past R1.4 billion last year, and in SA the victim pays for the loss, not the bank. So this local founder built the scam-checker we need…

Ever get one of those "your parcel is stuck at the depot" SMSes? No, you shouldn't pay the R19.13 to release it, because it's a scam. Crooks have simply used the rise of Temu and Shein deliveries to scam honest South Africans out of small, insignificant-seeming amounts.

But it's a symptom of a bigger SA fraud shift:

AI scammers now con us everyday peeps directly. A big problem locally, because, unlike in the UK where banks still reimburse fraud victims (up to £85,000, close to R2 million), SA has no such rules. We're on our own out here.

It bothered local founder Marcel Norman when a family member got swindled by a courier scam. Looking for a safeguard, he found international apps didn't work for how South Africans get scammed. So he started building his own and, this time, was able to catch swindlers posing as his "bank's fraud department" before they could do damage. He was onto something…

The app that spots a scam a mile off

Verifyd lets you paste a suspicious SMS, email or WhatsApp into your phone, or scan a dodgy QR code, and get a plain-language verdict in seconds. Green if it looks clean, orange if it's worth a second look, red if it's almost certainly a scam.

It checks everything from content patterns and sender reputation to shortened links, domain ages, the works. And it's different from caller-ID apps (they check the number) because it focuses on the message, useful in SA where 60% prepaid SIMs are recycled every year.

The core scam check is free, and always will be with no ads, according to Marcel. But there is a R24.99 per month option that gives you unlimited verdicts from an AI trained on SA scam trends, as well as saved reports, sync, and a Monitor My Number alert if your digits start showing up in scams.

It's great for users as is, but we can't help thinking that Marcel is building for the day SA liability rules catch up, 'cos then he'll have something ready for banks to potentially plug into.

We're watching this space…

In 2026, US FinTech Ramp let the team build their own productivity suite instead of buying one. They started by building an AI tool they pre-configured with all their other tools (Salesforce, etc.) and let employees package their best workflows into reusable files that teach the agent how to do a specific job, and share them with everyone else.

The lekker clever part:

✅ Over 350 staff-built skills now shared company-wide
✅ An AI guide helps based on roles and recent work
✅ Scheduled automations don’t need engineers anymore — anyone can do it

Ramp argues that internal speed is a moat, and employees building their own workflows helps teach everyone lessons about the customer-facing product too.

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

Ask an SA VC for a R500m valuation, and they're not thinking about your business anymore; they're calculating an exit that has to happen inside their fund's lifetime. We asked one of SA's longest-serving venture capitalists what actually goes through his head when a founder names a number.

Here are 4 specific checks to run the 10x exit math on your own valuation before you walk in.

💰 Raised Abroad, Hiring Here. SA AI venture Verascient has closed an $1.2m (R19.5m) pre-seed round from Founder Collective, Cambridge Enterprise and Andrena Ventures. Just a few weeks after our feature. Mooi man.

🌐 R14.4bn on Township Fibre. A DNI-led consortium has taken new shares in Frogfoot, Vox and Hypa at a R14.4bn valuation, targeting 360'000 connections a year, four times the current rate. Goeiste, that space is heating up fast now.

⚖️ Uber’s R15bn Automation Fine. The Dutch regulator has fined Uber €825m (R15.4bn) over driver accounts deactivated by an automated process with no human involved. Eina, but yeah, we can see how it can defs look like that in their operation.

📉 MTN Fired 1.5 Million Customers. MTN's prepaid base fell by 1.5 million, and not by mistake: Since December, they’ve been deliberately culling airtime-loan users. The hidden part is that voice is down 10.2%, probably because guys like Capitec are now giving minutes for free alongside a banking relationship. Hard to price-match free.

💸 Faster VC Deals. Why does preparing funding deals take so much longer in SA? Well, the US and UK are speeding it up with templated processes. So Dommisse Attorneys and SAVCA created SA's first open-source model investment documents; see more here.*

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

Yesterday, we featured FuelCue race fuel planner, asking when you usually run out of steam. And the answer doesn’t surprise us much at all…

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ ☕ 3 pm, every single day (41%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📉 Somewhere in the third week of the month (14%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🫠 Roughly forty minutes into any meeting (45%)

On 25 August 1991, Linus Torvalds posted a message to the newsgroup comp.os.minix under the subject line "What would you like to see most in minix?" It marks the first public sign that he was building an operating system, which would go on to become Linux.

Beyond the Red-Green Loop: Building with Coding Agents, 26 Aug, Online: Schalk Neethling (17 years building for the open web, 12 at Mozilla) on building the environment agents work inside, not just better prompts. Free. Register free.

Indie Hackers #52, 27 Aug, Cape Town: Lean coffee format, agenda built by the room, for people building tech businesses that make money. No elevator pitches. Free. Get tickets.

Digital Divas Summit 2026, 28 Aug, Cape Town: A full day at Innovation City on career growth, AI, ambition and visibility, under this year's SHIFT theme. R1'199. Join here.

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: Sela lets you keep track of loved ones’ medications, vitals, pain logs, appointments and notes in one place.

🌍 That's Interesting: Archaeologists found a 1'600-year-old mummy in Egypt holding a piece of Homer's Iliad. Ancient Egyptians with Greek texts is not even the weirdest part: mummies are normally buried with magic spells; this is the first time a mummy was found with actual literature in its tomb.