Enough social? With the US still threatening to ban TikTok unless they sell to an American concern, a new potential buyer has emerged: Mr Beast says he wants to try buy the platform. His Insta fans seem a little torn by the idea — check the comments on his post.

And just like that, it’s another Fast-Five Friday — 5 things in SA startup worth knowing about… let’s dive in!

Together with:

1. HAPPY DAYS

Big Benefits from Small Business

Any small-to-medium business owner’s heart sinks when that rockstar potential recruit goes “What benefits do you offer?”. The reality is that setting up benefits as a small business is a major admin overhead and hassle, and it’s something that’s mostly been reserved for employees in larger companies and corporations.

Yet research in the USA claims that 62% of employees under 50 wouldn’t consider a company if it didn’t offer voluntary benefits to employees — we suspect it might be a bit less in SA, but if you are shooting for the best kind of employees, it makes sense to want to pull from the largest pool and not disqualify your company for not offering a benefit.

This is a problem local startup Bento is tackling. Its digital platform simplifies the administration of benefits like retirement funds, medical aid, insurance, and wellness programmes while offering access to a host of modern workplace benefits such as Ollie.

It integrates with existing payroll systems and uses AI to provide personalised advice, reducing costs, improving transparency, and empowering employees to self-manage their benefits, helping SMEs attract and retain talent while improving employee well-being. Lekker.

2. PROMOTE THAT BNB

Making it Easy to Rank Way High

As of 2023, South Africa hosts approximately 65’000 Airbnb listings, a threefold increase from October 2017. Cape Town alone accounts for 18’264 of these listings! Add another estimated 5’800 guest houses and you have a whole bunch of accommodation trying to land your stay.

And whilst a good rating on Airbnb already does a lot, many larger establishments need to do more to make sure they rank high on Google, constantly have good content for social and can tell their story well.

The problem is however is that very few of these people can afford a content creator even on a freelance base.

Enter local AI startup, Smart Pineapple.

It uses AI coupled with typical templates that lodges, guesthouses or hotels would use to create social posts, newsletters, blog posts and even website content. It helps these organisations up their content game without breaking the bank.

3. WHERE’S WILLEM?

Snapping those Fans in the Stands…

Think of some of SA’s iconic sporting moments. The Bokke winning the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Or Bafana Bafana winning the 1996 African Cup of Nations. Or The Proteas 438 cricket match in 2006. Truly “Where were you?” moments.

With cell phones and social media, for many people, it’s a big deal to show they were at the game. Cool for fans. But not so great for teams, stadiums and brands who might be left out of the convo. And sports brands like to be part of the online convo – we spoke about this in a previous Open Letter.

That’s why the team over at Fancam has built something awesome with their high-resolution, 360-degree gigapixel imagery

It is no longer a startup by any means, having been founded in 2010, but we bumped into one of the Fancam team members recently and heard they are killing it in the USA.

The concept is simple: High-res 360-degree cameras capture everyone in the stands before a game starts and fans can find themselves in the stands (in one massive pic with everyone else), tag themselves in the Fancam pic, and share it on their social channels (with a bit of customisable event/team/stadium branding).

Like they did at this recent event you might recognise…

4. A WELCOME BREAK

Stand-in Medical Pros on Demand

The 34’033 private medical practices in South Africa all have a problem that is unique to their industry — most need to be open all the time. That means when any of the 360k odd workers in the private sector want to or need to take time off, the options are limited to:

• Close and lose customers for good (might be ok if you sell clothes, but get known as the medical practice that “isn’t open when you need them” and you might be out of business soon).

• Let other staff work longer or more shifts (not always feasible).

• Get a locum to stand in for you.

A locum, which comes from locum tenens (Latin for placeholder), refers to a professional who temporarily fills the duties of another. The concept is as old as the professional medical industry itself, but it hasn’t always been easy to find someone to replace you should an emergency pop up.

That’s what local scale-up LocumBase is solving. It’s a local online booking platform that allows Drs, nurses, vets, dentists, pharmacists and a whole host of other medical professionals to work as locums that medical practices can book based on their real-time availability, either by directly requesting a specific Llocum or creating an open offer that locums can apply to.   

With 800+ practices, 11’000+ locums, and more than R3.5 million already processed, we think they could be onto a model that solves a very real and painful problem for medical professionals…

5. FROM THE OPEN COLLAB COMMUNITY

Made in SA for SA

South Africa played a pivotal role in the global adoption of prepaid electricity meters. Back in 1993, we pioneered the Standard Transfer Specification (STS). This protocol standardised communication for prepaid meters and was recognised in 1997 as an open international standard, leading to widespread adoption of the protocol and prepaid electricity globally.

Coupled with local municipalities struggling to collect payments efficiently, it’s no wonder then that prepaid electricity really took off in SA where we have some 11.4 million prepaid electricity meters.

But prepaid doesn’t only benefit municipalities and Eskom — landlords can now better manage expenses by ensuring tenants pay for their own power.

Despite those upsides, the user experience isn’t always great. For one, property managers with various properties (think companies managing multiple metered Airbnbs or large corporate with multiple sites using prepaid meters). Managing these meters and buying for all of them from a central, remote location can be a nightmare.

That’s where local scale-up, Prepaid24 comes in.

Prepaid24 is the largest independent seller of prepaid electricity in South Africa and has been around since 2009. They built a platform that makes managing your multiple sites’ electricity a breeze. What’s more, with a large amount of purchase data and history, they use intelligence to very accurately predict when a property is running low on electricity, helping ensure the lights stay on.

Do you want to build with folks like Corné Lindeque from Prepaid24, and more? Join The Open Collab and work side-by-side with heavy hitters from the SA startup scene.

IN SHORT

Be the smartest parent on the school run…

💰 Startup Funding. Local SaaS startup The Awareness Company has landed R30 million in seed round funding from investors including NEXT176, Holocene, Catalyst Fund, E Squared, Aions, and Jozi Angels. The funding will go towards enhancing their product Hydra’s AI capabilities and boosting sales and marketing efforts. Congrats to The Awareness Company team and Co-Founders Shazia & Priaash, part of our Open Collab Community. 

🛌 Travel Funds. SA travel startup Conservio has raised R1 million in its second funding round. The funding round includes E4E Africa, Volve Capital, Living Hope Ventures and angel investors like African tech entrepreneur Jonathan Smith (Payfast), and will help Conservio grow its customer base and onboard more than 2’000 local properties to its portfolio. Nice one.

🔒 Locking it down. Local cyber security firm Nclose has just been acquired by Integrity360 for an undisclosed amount. The deal includes Nclose’s "Cyberfire", a creative and complementary MDR technology for SMEs and mid-market enterprises. ICYMI, we had Nclose’s Co-Founders Stephan and Martin on our Podcast in mid-2023. 

👖Jeans not selling over there? Local recommence startup FARO raised $6m to pursue their vision of bringing unsold inventory of the likes of Calvin Kein, Tommy Hilfiger and Zara to Africa and selling at reduced prices. Having launched in 2023, they have hit $2.3m in revenue from only four stores. Which goes to show just how much margin there is in premium clothing (even at a lower price)

🗓️ How AI Reminds You. Open AI is rolling out a new ChatGPT feature that will let you schedule tasks for ChatGPT to do later. So you could schedule something like writing a bedtime story at 8 PM every night or reminding you to switch on your geyser at 6 AM, or even remind you to press play on THAT Nickleback tune to get the braai started, and ChatGPT will send you a notification at the requested time. PS: Good luck getting that song out of your head now.

🏆 Mother City Champs (Pt. 2). Cape Town has just been named The Best City in the World by Time Out. After coming in 2nd last year, the Mother City took the top spot with only 2 other African cities, Marrakech (in 32nd place) and Lagos (in 41st place), making it into the top 50. Pretty cool – despite its traffic problems we lamented in Tuesday’s Open Letter.

CHECK THIS OUT

Make Yourself Wealthier on Autopilot

Without giving up on life’s little luxuries…

While it’s true that most very wealthy people make their money through entrepreneurship, those who invest are generally wealthier and live more comfortably than their peers who don’t.

In fact, did you know that if you invested just R1 000 per month in an average-performing fund that just regularly outpaces inflation, from age 25 to 60, you’ll accrue almost R4.5 million?

The best part of that is that a monthly R1 000 is small enough to allow you to still invest the bulk of your time and resources into building your business… the difference is you’ll have a cool R4.5 million waiting for you at 60, win or lose. 

To make it even better, if you put that R 1000 in a tax-free investment, you won’t have to pay any of that over to SARS.

So why don’t more people just drop that R1k per month on investment?

The best guess most pundits have is it's about education and behaviour:

• If you don’t know it’s that easy to build wealth, you can’t do it.

• And if you don’t build the habit of putting that R1k away monthly, you won’t have the prize at the end.

Ah, but we have a shortcut for you… Automated Investing.

Building Wealth While You Sleep

You see, saving and investing doesn’t mean you have to start packing sandwiches, making yourself coffee at home, sacrificing life’s little luxuries or lowering your standard of living.

One of the most impactful things you can do to build long-term wealth is automating your investments. Simply set up a system that invests a percentage of your income automatically every month, and you’re golden.

To start, set up a debit order with Fynbos Money and check out the powerful automation rules you can use to automatically allocate your investments.

fynbosmoney

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JOBS IN TECH

Switch it up in 2025…

👩🏼‍🔬 Senior Backend Engineer @ Cue

💡 Senior Machine Learning Engineer @ Lula

🎯 Software Development Engineer @ AnyVan

💬 Client Solutions Manager @ Voxeon

🧠 Financial Manager @ Bridgement

Hiring? Get in touch, and we will feature it here.

GAME TIME

Find zen with this ZA startup Haiku…

Swift hands clear the way,

Bringing order, ease, and care.

Who transforms your day?