Hi, welcome to Tech This Evening, an After-Work Tech Newsletter from Techparley Africa. Sure, there is a lot to unpack right now. Sit back, while I walk you through.
Top Story: Exclusive: How Le Roux Viljoen Is Building South Africa’s Surgical Theatre Assistance Network With Surgical Assistant and SurgiFlow
Operating theatres are among the most high-stakes environments in medicine, as every procedure requires a precisely coordinated team. Yet for years, surgeons in South Africa often struggle to find qualified medical officers (MOs) and general practitioners (GPs) to assist in theatre. For Le Roux Viljoen, the founder of The Surgical Assistant, and SurgiFlow, the inefficiencies were impossible to ignore.
In an exclusive interview with Techparley Africa, Viljoen, a former Orthopaedic Medical Officer with experience in both public and private hospitals, said he realised that by formalising theatre assistance through a digital platform, he could reduce inefficiencies, improve access for underutilised clinicians, and create a system of trust, transparency, and accountability.
That vision gave birth to The Surgical Assistant, a service connecting surgeons to vetted assistants, and later, SurgiFlow, its digital platform designed to streamline scheduling, matching, and credential verification.
“Theatre time is expensive and highly scheduled. Yet the process of securing appropriately skilled assistance was manual, fragmented, and opaque,” Viljoen told Techparley Africa. “That coordination gap was the genesis of The Surgical Assistant. SurgiFlow was the evolution – taking what started as manual matching and translating it into structured infrastructure.”
Other Tech News Stories You Should Read:
How Nigeria’s Adaptive Atelier Is Using AI to Improve Online Accessibility for People With Disabilities. Read now.
Ricursive Intelligence Raises $300m to Automate Chip Design with AI. Read now.
XSML Capital Raises US$142M for Fourth African Fund, Surpassing Target in Strong Vote of Confidence for SME Financing. Read now.
On Startup Spotlight:
Exclusive: Inside Zuru, the South African Startup Automating Bookings, Quotes And Payments For African Tour Operators
As Africa’s travel and tourism sector continues to expand, many of the operators powering that growth remain reliant on manual processes and fragmented digital tools to manage bookings, customer communication and payments. For Kinsley Ndenge and Stephen Mutua, co-founders of South African travel-tech startup, Zuru, that imbalance was impossible to ignore.
In an exclusive interview with Techparley Africa, Kinsley said this operational gap inspired the creation of Zuru, a platform designed to consolidate travel and tour business workflows into a single operating environment.
“Tourism in Africa is growing, especially South Africa, but the operators at the heart of that growth remain operationally stuck in the past,” Kinsley told Techparley Africa. “Zuru was built on the recognition that local tour and activity businesses are being left behind due to the lack of operational tools that can scale with these increases in tourist numbers.”
That divergence, he argued, risks constraining one of the continent’s most promising experience-driven sectors, particularly as African travellers themselves begin to account for a larger share of movement across regional corridors.
Quadri Adejumo brings you all the details. Read here.
Also Read:
Zambia’s Lupiya Extends Series A to $11.25m to Accelerate Digital Banking Expansion Across Southern and East Africa. Yakub Abdulrasheed brings us the details, here.
Quote of the Day:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is equivalent to magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke.
Thank you for joining me yet again this evening. Stay safe, and see you tomorrow for the next tech newsletter.
Best, Quadri
