High tech {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? To push robots to their limits, a team of engineers has modified one to take it up Ecuador's Chimborazo volcano, at 6.2k metres high, it's the furthest point from the centre of the Earth. Next stop, Everest, of course. 🏔️

Send this to the friends you’d robo-climb Everest with. 🤖

In Today’s Open Letter

Traditional small businesses make up 40% of the country's GDP and roughly 60% of employment, but no one noticed that the entire sector was buckling and showing dangerous signs of stagnation – except the only SA company that has the actual data…

We often say that building a successful business in SA is tough, but the data is fragmentary: Absa/BMR’s Small Business Growth Index shows 52.8% of SA small businesses are contracting, while the IMF warned the government that SA’s business environment is too constrictive.

But what does that actually mean? 

Only one company has the actual data: Now in its 13th year, Yoco processes payments for over 200k SA merchants – the largest real-time dataset on SA SMEs. And their data drove the point home in 2026:

Input costs up, tool costs are at an all-time high and consumer spending down, meaning SA's independent businesses are running harder just to stand still.

But the same data showed Yoco something else

8% of merchants who adopted two or more integrated tools on the platform tripled their transaction volume. And R4.9 billion in recurring customer transactions passed through Yoco terminals in Q1 alone, i.e. loyalty behaviour that was happening naturally but not being rewarded.

So yesterday, at Yoco Next, Yoco announced one of the biggest changes in the SA SME space in its 11-year history: They are cutting transaction fees by up to 40% and pushing over R250 million a year back into SA small businesses.

Why? As a company, they are shifting to go deeper into industry verticals as opposed to competing on transaction margins.

From card machine to operating system

From Yoco AI (launching later this year), a read-and-write assistant built on a decade of merchant data to Yoco Loyalty that rewards repeat customers on every card tap (no app or punch cards), Industry modes with purpose-built dashboards for food, retail and beauty to Yoco Savings that pays 4% with no lock-in and auto-saves a percentage of each sale into goal-based pockets. Fantastic tool to auto-deploy collected VAT to earn yield on and limit surprises on VAT payment date

The early signs: 4'000 merchants adopted Yoco Savings in the first 21 days and already saved R3.4 million – before any of us even knew the product existed.

Finally, Yoco Connect opens the platform to third-party developers and integrations. One restaurant owner even vibecoded his own ordering screen using an iPad placed in his kitchen. 

They also announced MCP access, empowering those Claude and Codex power users to get the most from their data. See everything included here.

As Yoco co-founder Carl Wazen put it on stage: "We are building towards something bigger than a card machine. The right care can help independent businesses move from survival work into growth work."

What is this signalling? Payments are getting commoditised, and FinTechs and payment companies are likely to follow in building deep into verticals. 

We're watching this space…

Did the US government just pull the most powerful AI model from everyone? Anthropic’s Fable 5 was the first Mythos-class model regular users could touch, until the US issued an export-control directive blocking any foreign national from accessing it. Read what happened.

What if 300 AI agents ran on your laptop at once? Moonshot AI's Kimi Work is a desktop agent that drives your browser, reads local files and runs a swarm of up to 300 mini-agents in parallel — at maybe a tenth of the cost. Try it here.

Can ML decode what your customers actually buy together? Praelexis helped an FMCG retailer move beyond generic industry baskets by building ML models that revealed real purchasing patterns and enabled hyper-personalised recommendations. See the case study.

There's a gap most SA executives don't know they have. It sits between how good they actually are and how the market sees them online.

A potential partner Googles you before the meeting. An investor checks your LinkedIn before taking the call. A conference organiser looks you up before sending the invite. If what they find doesn't match the person who walks into the room, the conversation never starts. You don't get a rejection. You get silence.

Meanwhile, your competitors' leaders are showing up in feeds, shaping conversations and building visibility that compounds into pipeline, partnerships and invitations.

The gap between your actual authority and your visible authority is costing you in ways you can't trace. And your company page won't close it. Only the people leading the business can.

📱 Bank Meets Telco. Standard Bank Connect just launched an eSIM as its MVNO hits 350'000 customers. They're just one of a growing number — SA's MVNO scene is getting crowded, and there's no word on proper regulation yet.

🤖 $60bn for a Code Editor. SpaceX has exercised a call option to acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion; the largest VC-backed acquisition ever outside Musk's self-deal for xAI. Cursor raised $3.38bn since 2022. The returns are staggering.

⚽ World Cup Data Sorted. SABC Plus is streaming 34 free World Cup matches, and now Vodacom is selling dedicated data bundles so you don't burn through your monthly cap. Sounds like a deal.

📊 Finfluencer Red Card. 1 in 4 TikTok finance videos raised accuracy concerns in a global study, 68% don't comply with regulations, and researchers say consumers can't be expected to carry all the responsibility. The full study is worth a read.

💬 Sales, Not Spam. Poetry already had the brand and the audience. So Chat Inc turned WhatsApp into a high-conversion sales channel that pulled in 14.8k shoppers to generate R1.58 million in revenue at 269% ROI. Ask them to do the same for you.*

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

Most products lose people at the pitch, not the price. So we got an SA product strategist who's helped launch 150+ startups to show us the brutally simple test for whether your message is actually landing.

And it turns out, there are 4 specific steps to check whether people understand what you do before it costs you the sale.

☝ Send this to a friend who needs more customers. 😍

Yesterday, we showed you Femmflo’s women’s health tracker, asking about the biggest frustration with women's healthcare. Most here say doctors dismiss symptoms too easily…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🩺 Doctors dismiss symptoms too easily (31%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 📊 My health data is scattered across apps, labs and files (21%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ ⏳ It took years to get a proper diagnosis (14%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤷 I don't even know what's normal for my body (17%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💡 The info exists, but no one connects the dots (17%)

SA's government spending on health, education and housing has barely recovered since Covid — and per person, it's actually getting worse.

💡 Health spending per person dropped by 12% from R5'135 in 2020/21 to R4'523 in 2025/26, and is projected to fall further to R4'465 by 2028/29.

💡 Defence spending has declined 25% over 20 years, while housing surged between 2005 and 2013, then flatlined.

The population hasn’t shrunk, and tax income grew significantly, which means the demand for private alternatives isn't theoretical — it's structural.

🧩 Tool to Try: PactAlert will remind you of any contractual obligations and promises you made.

🎤 That's Interesting: Not wanting his father Julio to know about his aspirations, Enrique Iglesias borrowed money from a former nanny to record a demo tape, pitched it under the name Enrique Martinez, claiming he was from Guatemala, got signed by a Mexican indie label, then recorded his first album in Toronto so his dad wouldn't find out.

✈️ Next Level: Watch a Dutch pilot stay calm and land her plane after the canopy shatters mid-flight.

🌌 Wow Site: Cosmodial Sky Atlas lets you set your location, and it draws the live sky above you with 100k+ stars, the Milky Way and the planets.