Feeling leggy {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? You can now download and 3D-print your own pair of open-source robot legs, or, if you're feeling ambitious, an entire humanoid robot for about R100k in printing materials. DIY Terminator energy. 🦿

Send this to a friend who needs a robot to clean their house. 🤖

In This Open Letter:

96% of SA internet users are on WhatsApp (28M), but we can’t really trust owners Meta, who just got sued again last week over encryption failures – so this local founder built the ultimate secure messaging system…

It’s true, Zuck’s constantly paying settlements and just continuing with an app that, even if it doesn’t record messages, still collects your entire address book and analyses your communication patterns, etc. – that’s why tens of millions migrated to Telegram in 2021.

But the stakes are higher in SA: We logged 3,219 data breach notifications in one year. And attorneys and whistleblowers like Bouwer van Niekerk are being killed for the work they do, so you need airtight comms.

Which is what this local founder built…

The SA messaging app that can't spy on its own users

Veylt is a face-gated, zero-trace messaging app built by Cape Town's Henrico Bekker (who you may remember from our Sawubona feature the other day).

The idea came from the fact that Henrico’s wife works in the legal profession, and he wondered, if you’re having convos that put your or clients’ lives at risk, where would you go?

So he built a platform where messages are encrypted on your device before they leave it, locked to the recipient's face using Apple's TrueDepth sensor (30’000 infrared dots mapping your face in 3D), and disappear after a single view. No accounts, no phone numbers and no trace you ever existed on the platform.

The key tech: the face-gating

If the app loses sight of your face mid-read, the message vanishes. Someone grabs your phone? Gone until the sensor sees you. It’s got self-destruct timers, decoy messages for duress situations, and screenshot alerts tied to wallet addresses. Even copy-paste is a dead end; messages are encrypted images.

Veylt sees around 10 new wallets daily, but there are literally no user records, so even Henrico can't tell who those users are. That's not a gap in the data; that's the architecture working exactly as designed.

And beyond lawyers and whistleblowers, this could be useful for any number of use cases.

We're (secretly) watching this space…

Most AI tools forget you the moment the chat ends. SureThing doesn’t.

SureThing is an autonomous agent that can draft in your voice, triage what matters, follow up on things you forgot, and report back with what happened next.

Day 1, you onboard it.
Day 30, it knows your clients and patterns.
Day 90, it catches things you missed.

Try SureThing

Building hardware in Africa? Applications are open for Cohort 4 of the Savant Build Programme, a funded accelerator for deep-tech startups running from August to November 2026. Backed by GIZ and Western Cape DEDAT. Apply by 15 June.

Time to hire an ad agency? Here are the telltale signs you've gone as far as you can internally, plus how to choose the right one for your business. Get the insights.

R600M in investments. Your questions answered. This Friday, we're hosting a virtual investor roundtable AMA with Next176 (Old Mutual’s venture arm)'s Head of Investments, Rajiv Daya. Exclusive to Founder Collab members. Join to get access.

💻 Neo Killer? Not Quite. PC makers are scrambling to compete with Apple's budget MacBook Neo. Dell's latest attempt, the new XPS 13 at $699, is solid but still $100 over budget. Quite a few of our team are loving the Neo already.

💰 Paying With Crypto, For Real. South Africans have bought goods and services from SA shops for some R30 million via Binance Pay in the last 5 months. With almost 8 million South Africans now on crypto platforms, this isn't a niche anymore.

🍺 Booze Tax Incoming. SA is facing proposed alcohol tax changes, including higher levies on stronger drinks and minimum pricing for cheap alcohol, aimed at curbing alcohol-related social harms. Braai budgets, brace yourselves.

🍔 Mini Madness Begins. After a successful US run, McDonald's SA is rolling out Little McDonald's mini toys with loyalty points, similar to Checkers' collectables. SA parents, prepare to be trading these on WhatsApp groups by Friday.

🤖 AI, Implemented. Most companies talk about AI. Few know where to start. Praelexis AI is an advisory and implementation partner that identifies high-impact use cases, fixes your data foundation and builds bespoke ML, predictive analytics and GenAI solutions that actually ship.*

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

Yesterday, we showed you Vouched referral recruitment, asking how you actually find your best hires. Most just trust their network…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🤝 Referrals from people I trust (54%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📋 Recruitment agencies (8%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💼 LinkedIn and job boards (17%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🏢 Internal promotions and moves (8%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤷 Honestly, it's a coin flip every time (13%)

On 2 June 1966, NASA's Surveyor 1 was the first US spacecraft to soft-land on an extraterrestrial body. Before that, they had a lot of crash landings, but this one made the actual moon landing (3 years later) possible.

Worth noting: Surveyor 1 wasn’t the absolute first. The Soviet Union had landed on the moon four months before the US.

🧩 Tool to Try: KidWatch spots bad language on YouTube vids before you do.

🌍 That's Interesting: In 1993, a woman lost her vision in a car accident. 23 years later, she fell, had spinal surgery, and woke up able to see. No one fully knows why.

🎨 Next Level: Watch this teen girl fight off a bear to save her dogs.

🕹️ Wow Site: Sub-Swap gives you alternate ingredients to swap out in recipes.