Enough space {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? The entire Karoo town (103 hectares) of Middelpos is going on auction next month. It includes 3 houses, a hotel, shop, factory, hall, an old Post Office and a decent borehole you can use to irrigate just under 5 hectares of land. Daarshy, vat vir hom. 🐑

In This Open Letter

SA's youth unemployment rate sits at 57%. But the problem isn't just that people can't find jobs; companies are drowning in applications and battling to separate real candidates from slop – this local venture’s bringing the clarity…

There are so many applicants to process. Just check this video of job seekers gathered outside a hiring company in Cape Town:

And that's just people queuing in person. Spend any time on LinkedIn's jobs tab and you'll see posts a few hours old with 100+ applications already. And even when you find someone, SA labour law means a wrong hire can be a painful process to rectify.

The SA hiring platform that just pulled 500k candidates in 30 days

When we first featured Wamly in 2024, they were doing one thing: Asynchronous one-way video interviews at scale. Candidates record answers in their own time, recruiters screen faster with less bias and less calendar-shuffling. The year before (2023), they had won Innovation City's Startup of the Year.

Since then, the growth has been serious. The single video interview module is now a six-module hiring suite that covers applicant tracking, skills testing, video interviews, psychometric assessments and background checks. 

It’s the kind of stack that an enterprise HR team used to need three or four vendors to piece together. Wamly built it themselves.

The team has grown from 7 to 32. The platform now serves candidates across 147 countries. Annual recurring revenue is growing at nearly 70% YoY, and they have a Series A in progress.

Building new things

The most recent launch is Wamly Jobs (February 2026): A candidate portal built for the 90–95% of applicants who go through a hiring process and hear absolutely nothing back. (It pulled 500,000 candidates through in its first month.)

As founder Francois de Wet put it after the Startup of the Year win: "You're not stuck in your own head, believing your own story." The validation clearly fuelled what came next.

For a country with 7.8 million people looking for work, a platform that makes hiring faster for employers and more human for candidates is one worth paying attention to.

Early recognition helped them gain traction. Want the same? We've teamed up with Innovation City for this year's Startup of the Year. Entries close 27 April: Enter now →

Most founders know LinkedIn matters. Few have the time to make it work.

That's the gap FDC was built for. They don't run company pages — they build executives' personal brands into structured sales channels. Profile optimisation, content strategy, targeted networking and lead generation. All managed, all measurable.

The numbers:

✅ 12’000+ leads and opportunities generated across 300+ clients
✅ 95% increase in connections within three months
✅ 361% average increase in engagement

Every client gets a dedicated content creator, account executive and account manager, with full visibility through the FDC Exchange platform.

🛵 TipstyTipsty. Shoprite’s on-demand grocery delivery platform Sixty60 has revealed it’s created more than 18’000 jobs since its inception. More than half are delivery riders who’d earned more than R160 million in tips in the 2nd half of 2025 alone. Mega.

✔️ Are We Human? Sam Altman’s human ID verification side hustle, World, is collabing with Zoom to ensure people in meetings are actually real and not AI-generated. Wait… didn't OpenAI launch an app to let you create a deepfake of yourself like 6 months ago…?

🌊 SpongeBob Gets Beefier Interwebs Speeds. Local researchers have developed next-level underwater Wi-Fi tech to send high-res sonar images of ocean pipelines, subsea cables and hidden underwater mines faster than ever before. Nice one.

🇿🇦 Even More Local Bragging Rights. UK-based long-haul travel booking platform, Travelbag, has just crowned its World’s Top 10 Popular Beaches. And South Africa has the top 2: Boulders Beach took top spot, followed by Cape of Good Hope Beach in second. Well, hello…

📈 Pipeline Switched On. Growing SA software consultants IQ Business needed leads but didn’t have the in-house muscle to run effective campaigns. So Cloud on Demand funded and ran full social media campaigns, turning marketing spend into qualified leads and real sales.*

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

AI is now a macro capital allocation signal. AI-driven narratives are moving real, and not just in tech. As AI infrastructure spending nears $3 trillion globally, crypto positioning is following the signal. Read the full report.

Binance AI Pro just scored a near-60% win rate. The AI trading assistant beat baselines in a rigorous evaluation framework, proving it can handle spot orders, futures, market analysis and custom strategies via natural language. See it in action.

DeFi, TradFi and CeFi are converging. Decentralised finance, traditional finance and centralised exchange infrastructure are merging into one financial stack. RWA tokenisation is now at $27bn+ and stablecoins are scaling. See the full analysis.

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 Lincoln City's turnaround story, asking whether more SA investors should look at international sport as an investment. The verdict? Fix home first…

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ ⚽ Yes — this is how you build global SA influence — 25%

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 💰 Only if you've got Moneyball brains, not just money — 28%

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤔 Interesting, but too risky for most — 11%

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🏉 We should be investing this energy in SA sport first — 33%

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🔥 Where do I sign up? — 3%

Your 2 cents…

The eternal chicken-and-egg, Elke — maybe the trick is backing founders who can throw the boomerang and catch it. 🪃

Bots & Bubbles: How AI Rewires Financial Services – 23 Apr, CPT: AI in fraud, payments and risk — with leaders from Payfast, TransUnion and Orca Fraud. Get tickets (R50).

Product Is a Bug Until Users Pay – 24 Apr, Online: Renier Kriel previews his DevConf talk on why products without paying users are just bugs waiting to be fixed. Register free.

DevConf JHB – 12 May, Midrand: SA's premier developer conference — 5 tracks, 35+ speakers, one massive day. Get tickets.

DevConf CPT – 14 May, Century City: Same energy, but at the Cape Town edition. Book your spot.

Startup of the Year 2026 – 14 May, CPT: Live pitches, Innovation City Awards and the ecosystem in one room. Get tickets.

🧩 Tool to Try: Face2Social finds social media profiles from faces.

📚 That's Interesting: In 2005, a 15-year-old girl in Moldova hand-copied the entire Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince word for word into five notebooks because the book wasn't available in her country yet. Dedication.

🐳 Next Level: Watch divers free a whale shark tangled in fishing rope.

🎨 Wow Site: Legal Walls helps you find walls you can legally graffiti.

🧠 Work Smarter: He built a R4bn-a-year company from scratch. And he says that if your business isn’t scaling, you’re not being cringe enough. Uncomfortable and annoying, but R4bn says it’s probably true.