Thetha AI
SpazaOS
An operating system for a spaza shop. It runs the sales, the stock and the credit book from a phone, and produces the records the shop needs to get a municipal permit and apply for government funding.
Three modules
The credit book. The informal customer ledger every shop keeps on paper and every owner dreads. It holds information the owner cannot reconstruct if it is lost, it is touched daily, and it is currently managed in an exercise book. A buying channel is replaceable the day a competitor discounts. A ledger is not.
The compliance record. A structured, exportable pack for a municipal trading permit application and, where the shop is eligible, a Spaza Shop Support Fund submission. This is the acquisition wedge: it is cash-denominated and near-term, because a permit unlocks a funding application.
Sales and stock. Barcode scanning against a pre-loaded South African FMCG catalogue, so nobody has to type in a stock take before getting value. Works offline; the till never waits on the network.
What it does not do
It does not take a margin on goods. SpazaOS never touches inventory. That model destroyed an entire category of African B2B platforms between 2022 and 2024.
It does not lend. Origination and scoring only. The company never carries credit risk on its own balance sheet.
It does not sell credit-book data. The names in a shop's credit book belong to third parties who have never heard of us. That information is never sold, shared, or included in any dataset supplied to anyone — identified, de-identified or aggregated.
It does not guarantee a permit. Whether a permit is granted is the municipality's decision. SpazaOS helps prepare the application. Nothing more is claimed.
Who pays
| Payer | For what |
|---|---|
| Shop owners | A small subscription, and a once-off fee for compliance support. Deliberately small — a shop clearing R3,000–R8,000 a month cannot carry meaningful software costs |
| FMCG manufacturers | Sell-out visibility. What actually moves, where, at what price. Brands sell to a wholesaler and lose sight of the product; this is the most valuable missing dataset in South African FMCG |
| Banks and lenders | Origination and scoring on shops with a verifiable transaction history |
Status
SpazaOS is in development. The till, stock control and sales history are built and working. The credit ledger and the compliance pack are not yet built — they are the next four months of work, and both will be specified from fieldwork in real shops rather than from assumptions.
No shop is using SpazaOS yet. There is no revenue.
