It’s alive? Forget The Fly, Australians are so fed up with insecticide-resistant mosquitoes, they’re gene-splicing male mozzies with spiders and venomous sea anemones, so instead of breeding, they kill off all the females. Sheez.

It’s Fast-Five Friday! That’s 5 startups doing big things in 5 minutes — let’s dive in…

Together with

1. STAY SAFE 

SA’s 30 Million Private Eyes…

It’s no secret that crime’s a major challenge in SA. With 1 cop for every 420-odd citizens, and despite there being 4x as many private security personnel as policemen, South Africans are up against it.

But even with a small police force, crime can be reduced if there is enough data. The problem, however, is that only about half of all crime is actually reported to the police. A large part of this data does exist, mostly in WhatsApp community groups, and that’s what local safety platform startup Wolf is tapping into.

Leveraging WhatsApp, a platform that nearly 29 million South Africans use pretty much all the time, Wolf provides an accessible way to report suspicious activity and crime by simply forwarding your community WhatsApp incident reports to their bot.

Then, using machine learning, it analyses data to predict potential threats and optimise the patrol routes for response teams while providing users with insights into what’s happening in their area — all in an effort to be smarter and prevent crime that way.

Once the adoption is good, it will provide super valuable information for government and community leaders by solving SA’s under-reporting issues.   

2. IT’S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN

Writing your Final Love Letter…

Dying without a Will in SA is a fun time – except of course for your loved ones who are then subject to the terms of SA’s Intestate Succession Act. Without a proper Will in place, the deceased’s estate gets divvied up according to legislation in a specific order, which becomes complicated when you consider that not everyone has a spouse or kids, or parents and grandparents.

And no one wants their deadbeat cousin Jimmy walking away with all their stuff simply because there’s a shared bloodline – or worse still, fall to the State. What’s really weird is that more than 85% of South Africans DO NOT have a will in place when they die… and perhaps it’s got to do with people hating to talk about death or simply the expected laborious process of setting it up.

Local scale-up, QuickWill (as the name suggests) offers a web & mobile platform for South Africans to quickly draft their Will using a guided wizard in as little as 4 steps. It can also keep your Will safe and act as an executor. And, since it’s online, you can come back and update your Will as you wish, whenever you wish. No more excuses…

3. BACK TO SCHOOL

Class is Now in Session…

With the new school year kicking off on Wednesday, nearly 1 million students will start matric, with many hoping to continue to some form of tertiary education when leaving school. But space is limited: public universities could only take about 200’000 first-time entrants in 2023. 

Local startup, Matric Live is an educational app aimed at helping matric learners supplement the learning happening in class, with contextual and visual examples for more than 16 matric subjects. The platform also offers matrics past exam papers that they can actually write, and with a built-in gamification element, students can challenge their friends on competitive exams to earn points (not to mention playground bragging rights).  

Matric Live has been going since 2017, with the first year of Covid seeing more than 630’000 students joining, earning it the Breakthrough Solution of the Year at the 2020 MTN Business App of the Year awards.

With competition so stiff to get a job in SA, and only around 20% of matrics getting a spot at an SA university, Matric Live might just give them the advantage they need.

4. FROM THE OPEN COLLAB COMMUNITY

More Money in the Pockets of Small-Scale Farmers…

For a small-scale farmer, getting their produce to your table can be a painful exercise…

Especially considering how much of the margins go towards transport (35%), commissions for warehousing (5%), and market agents (7.5%).

Local AgriTech founder Zamokuhle Thwala is on a mission to help change that with AgriKool, a marketplace with transparent, ethical pricing that connects small and medium-sized producers and retail buyers.

This gives producers more transparency, with an eye on increasing their revenue and profit margins (while they focus on what they do best: farm). Buyers, on the other hand, can now buy directly from the producer – saving time and money – via AgriKool’s secure platform.

They have made great traction, helping smaller-scale farmers offset produce at the likes of Boxer and Shoprite.

Zamokuhle is part of our founder community over at The Open Collab. With more than 80 SA founders and operators, The Open Collab is SA’s premium network for all things SA startups and scale-ups.

5. START WITH A BANG

Fill your 2025 Sales Pipeline

It’s time to hit the ground running – not just with warm leads, but good ones…

Problem: Most people believe you can just pay and spray with spammy LinkedIn outreach campaigns – you know, those messages from complete strangers that you ALWAYS IGNORE (just like most everyone else). Heck, even if people sometimes have some success with those things, you have to wonder if that client is even worth having ‘cos wow.

Leads don’t work that way because you can’t fool people into becoming good customers. And the way into the hearts and minds of your ideal target is often good old-fashioned trust, honesty and hard work.

Over at Stream (created and operated by the founders of The Open Letter), we found it pays to put your money where your mouth is and show potential customers why you are the best to work with. It works in 3 key steps:

1. Presence: Can they find you (SEO and socials) and do you communicate with enough substance to guide good decisions? 

2. Awareness: Will you be the first one they think of when they’re ready to buy? Are your insights resonating, showing up and keeping you top of mind?

3. Nurture: Does your content help them understand their challenges better? And, more importantly, does it tie their solution back to you?

Most brands do one, maybe two of these. But it’s only when you do all three that things start singing.

Wanna know how?

Book a FREE content strategy session with the Stream team before 17 January 2025.

IN SHORT

Never get short-changed in conversation again…

🤯 Crazy CES Tech. The Consumer Electronics Show 2025 was in full swing this week, with some pretty wild announcements and reveals like a 40-mile range solar-powered electric car, an air-purifying cat perch, heating and compression recovery boots, a toaster that “recharges” your iPhone in 2 seconds, and a robot vacuum that also tidies. All this in Januworry…

🌪️ Tackling the Climate Crisis. Innovate47, a Pakistani-based accelerator has expanded its Climate Action Accelerator programme to African founders in climate and sustainability startups from South Africa, Malawi, Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria. The 3-month programme aims to accelerate solutions to address the global climate crisis. How’s that Greta?

🧨 Dynamite Supercomputer. Nvidia announced its AI supercomputer, Project Digits recently. And it’s going for a cool 57’000 rondt. The supercomputer comes with Nvidia’s GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, offering “a petaflop of AI computing performance for prototyping, fine-tuning and running large AI models,”. This could very well be the start of AI running on your local machine as opposed to the cloud.

🥸 Made in China. Naspers and Prosus shares dropped by more than 9% and 8.75%, respectively, after a report by the US Defence Department labelled Tencent (of which Naspers and Prosus are 25% shareholders) and several other companies as “Chinese military entities” operating in the US. Well, I’ll be…

🔎 Fact-Checking is Dead. Meta is ending its 3rd-party fact-checking programme in the US, and adopting a Community Notes programme — just like X. Meta admits that while they removed millions of pieces of content each day during December (which in itself is concerning), only 1 or 2 didn't actually violate its policies. Hmmmm… if you wouldn't say it to someone's face, don’t type it in the Facebook comments.

⚖️ Legal Chihuahua. A local law firm is finding itself in hot water after it used “non-existent legal citations” in both written submissions and arguments in a court case, apparently sourced by AI. Of the 9 cases cited, only two have been found to exist. *Cue asking ChatGPT to write the judge a formal apology without admitting fault.

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JOBS IN TECH

New Year. New Role.

👩‍💻 Principal Product Manager — Technical @ Amazon Web Services (AWS)

🤳 Lead App Developer (Remote) @ ScorePlay

👩‍🎨 Creative Lead @ The Sourcing Lab

🤖 Head of Digital @ OneDayOnly

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

GAME TIME

Did you know?

A South African startup developed one of the world's first mobile payment platforms back in 2007, enabling mobile phones to be used for payments long before mobile wallets became mainstream globally.