Feeling lucky? Not like this Polish guy who found a piece of a SpaceX rocket in his garden, more like us buying you a coffee to start your day… That’s right if you get 2 of your friends to sign up for The Open Letter before Friday 8 AM — simply send them your unique referral link — and we’ll send you a 40 bucks Vida voucher. Give the gift of The Open Letter to your mates now.

(PS: Don’t cheat — we can tell.)

In this Open Letter:

• Big play: The startup rolling out tech to ease all your KYC pains.

• Accelerating OceanTech, Prosus’ takeaway splurge & coming off the Greylist.

• Room to grow: How to get the cash-flow support you need to make it in SA.

• Who knew (and didn’t know) the local dev boys? The results are in.

• Lonely building your startup? Join The Open Collab and get support.

Together with Lula:

TRENDING NOW

Taking the Pain Out of KYC

If you’ve ever applied for a financial product or service in your personal capacity, you’ll know they want to see a quarter of a million documents before anything gets done.

Now, most of them are your standard KYC (Know Your Customer) to ensure the FSP (Financial Service Provider) is FICA (Financial Intelligence Centre Act) compliant. But if you’re applying for a financial service outside of SA, it takes even more paperwork. 

And to make matters worse, these institutions are required by law, to have updated documentation. This means they will hunt you down over time and ask you to provide the same documents again, just in an updated format.

Not only for individuals

These painful processes aren’t limited to individuals. In fact, it’s even worse for companies:

Multiple bank accounts and products at different providers, statutory duties, and registering as a supplier with a large organisation or government all require different types of documentation.

Trading in Europe? From June 2024 onwards, companies must perform due diligence on suppliers to identify, prevent, and mitigate adverse human rights and environmental impacts across their supply chains. This is part of the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD).

All of which means more requests for documents – or, shall we say, more requests for the same kind of documents, from more companies. 

Compliance’s price tag

All of this compliance has good intentions…

Limit the flow of funds to terrorists, sanctioned individuals, abusers of human rights and those that are grossly negligent with the environment and, importantly, prevent fraud:

• In 2023, an estimated R23 trillion in illicit funds flowed through the global financial system, encompassing activities such as money laundering, human trafficking, drug trafficking, and terrorist financing. 

• Fraud has seen a dramatic rise, with a reported 1,400% increase over the past decade. 

• In 2023 alone, global losses from fraud scams and bank fraud schemes amounted to R8.9 trillion.

And while added levels of compliance will likely contribute to combatting these scourges, it comes at a price. In the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, financial crime compliance costs have reached R1.5 trillion, with 98% of financial institutions reporting increased expenses in this area. 

It’s estimated that executing a compliance check in Europe can cost anything between R18k to R183k per customer (depending on the level of depth and complexity) for regulated institutions. On the flip side, clients of these banks are often subjected to multiple, outdated and largely manual requests for compliance, like British Telecom, which has a team of over 200 people responding to due diligence checks. So, the problem is dual-sided.

Anything that can simplify this process to reduce costs and speed up time to execute, could be a real game changer for companies. 

The SA female founder are making a play

South African-born Cindy van Niekerk saw the massive overhead that compliance introduced when she worked at some of the world’s biggest banks and financial institutions in the UK. This led to her founding Umazi. James Deely, a seasoned banking COO and Michael Harvie CRO (another South African) comprise the founding team.

Umazi is pioneering decentralised, collaborative due diligence to speed up corporate identity verification. It allows companies of all sizes to create digital identities coupled with a repository of documents – these documents and declarations then only need to be verified once after which it can be shared (with permission from the owner) with companies requesting it. The regulated organisations benefit from the reuse of verified data, as they will be notified in real-time of any data changes and updates. This process can solve problems like re-FICA.

Cutting the cost of due diligence by sharing verification among different participants all while improving the speed at which checks can be done.

And they have made some great progress. 

Having won the Digital Isle of Man innovation challenge in 2024 (btw: entries for 2025 are now open, so check it out), Umazi is set to run a pilot with the island to create digital identities for newly created companies. They’ll perform standard due diligence and then supply data straight from the organisation’s Umazi-created digital Identity – cutting out all those tedious document processes.

It’s something that could change the game for virtually every business on the planet. We’re watching this space…

CHECK THIS OUT

Helping SA Businesses Keep the Cash Flowing

If you run a growing business in South Africa, you know the challenge: You need cash to scale — but growth often eats up your working capital. 

Whether you’re expanding locations, launching new products, or handling increased demand, cash flow gaps can stall progress when you can least afford it.

That’s where Lula steps in.

Lula provides quick, flexible funding solutions tailored to South African businesses. No long waits. No rigid conditions. Just the capital you need — when you need it — to keep moving forward.

See it in action

Take Off the Gluten Path, a fast-growing gluten-free food brand. Founder Bronwyn Phillips needed cash to test new retail spaces and expand their nationwide frozen food delivery. 

Traditional financing options were slow and restrictive — but Lula was different. 

With Lula’s funding:

✅ The application process was quick and easy.
✅ Approval was fast, with no unnecessary red tape.
✅ Funds were available when needed, giving Bronwyn the freedom to use them where they mattered most.

This kind of financial flexibility helped Off the Gluten Path grow without compromising its mission to serve customers who truly need safe, gluten-free options.

Your business could be next. 

Need to bridge a cash flow gap or fund your next big move?

IN SHORT

Strike up a conversation…

🛟 Ocean Rescues. The 6th edition of OceanHub’s accelerator programme is open for applications. The 12-month programme will help as many as 24 African startups working on preserving and restoring the world’s oceans. Applications close 30 June 2025 — apply here. Hmmm, any startups doing something about the Milnerton Lagoon?

🚨 Rapidly Acquired. RapidDeploy was recently acquired by Motorola. The startup was founded in Cape Town in 2016 and built a cloud-based emergency response and analytics platform. After major global traction, the startup moved to Texas, USA in 2018 and have gone on to service 1’600+ emergency communications centres. Another big win for the Saffa startup community!

🥡 Meals on Wheels. Naspers’ Prosus just picked up Just Eat Takeaway for a tasty $4.3 billion. The acquisition forms part of Prosus CEO Fabricio Bloisi’s rapid expansion plans for the group. The Uber Eats competitor operates in 17 markets around the world serving 61 million eaters. Wonder if the service would be expanded into SA?

👽 HD Space. NASA is launching a brand new telescope capable of creating the most colourful map of the cosmos in history. The infrared SPHEREx telescope takes spectroscopic images and will help scientists understand how the universe was formed, how galaxies have grown throughout cosmic history, and the location of water molecules anywhere in the galaxy. Now we gon see some things…

👏 Out of the Grey? South Africa has addressed (or at least largely addressed) 20 out of 22 action items set out by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and could see us be delisted from the FATF greylist in October if the remaining items — investigations and prosecutions of serious and complex money laundering, and terror-financing activities — are addressed in the next reporting period, March to June. *Cue the Start of a Slow Clap…

😎 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with next-level business strategy support from Metavolve, all your VC and startup legal sorted by Dommisse Attorneys and 12 more vital startup tools & services.

BUILDING TOGETHER

Happening over at The Open Collab

In the last few days alone, in our online community, we…

• Tested out a new platform with all kinds of tool kits, recordings and exclusive value-adds for the Collab 🤩.

• Helped Brandon get the ultimate remote exec PA service.

• Had a session on how to make financial year-end easy — with CFOs.

• Discussed who is the best type of person to help develop your products.

• Checked out the back-end setup of Gemin’s new AI co-pilot for science.

• Had a lekker laugh learning that even Paul Graham’s teens won’t listen to him.

• Put Chris in contact with a potentially valuable partner 🚀.

• Hooked Christian up with some quality door-to-door package services.

• Gave Danei some helpful feedback on their awesome new website.

Thinking about joining The Open Collab?

• Supercharge your network in the SA startup landscape — get that introduction, get that customer, or meet that partner.

• Get feedback on your products, services and/or offers from others who have built and are building their own products right now.

• Join all our online and in-person events for free!

• Exclusive 1-on-1 sessions with startup consultants.

SA’s only dedicated tech startup and scale-up founder community.

HAPPENING SOON

Upcoming Event

6 March 2025 — First Open Letter In-Person Event of 2025: Come meet us and the entire community at LaunchLab in Stellenbosch for another legendary Open Letter event — R100 per person (buy here) or free to members of The Open Collab community.

WHAT YOU SAID

Got devs?

Last Friday we riddled you an SA scale-up that helps corporates and other ventures get their software teams sorted with SA’s top talent. And almost everyone recognised good-ole OfferZen…

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💼 DevSouth (8%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🛡️ DevProtect (8%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 👨‍💻 OfferZen (72%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💳 HireADev (12%)

Your 2 cents…

We always try our best, thanks! 🙌

Gulp, thanks for the heads up, MrShenery. From now on, you know where to find us 🎣.