Today, we are incredibly excited to share that Dyner.ai is joining Yoco.

Over the last year, the Dyner team has quietly built something remarkable: an AI-native operating system for restaurants that gives owners far greater visibility and control over their businesses.

But more than the product itself, what drew us together was a shared belief about the future of independent businesses and the people behind them.

Restaurants are hard. Every day is operationally intense. Stock counts, supplier coordination, margins, staffing, wastage, peak-hour pressure, customer experience. Thousands of moving parts, all happening at once.

The founders of Dyner, Thalentha Ngobeni and Chris du Plessis, are both actuaries who previously worked at Discovery within Adrian Gore’s Office and Discovery Invest, respectively, before founding Dyner. They brought a deep understanding of systems, operations and analytics, but chose to apply those capabilities much closer to the ground, alongside independent business owners navigating the intensity of running restaurants every day.

They spent time inside restaurant environments, sitting with restaurateurs, watching teams operate during dinner rushes and taking late-night calls about invoices, GP margins and operational issues that most customers never see. Many of Dyner’s customers, including Plato Coffee, were already Yoco merchants, which made the alignment feel incredibly natural from the beginning.

And you could feel the difference in the way these businesses operated. It felt like the businesses using Dyner had an unfair advantage, with better visibility, tighter operations and faster decision-making.

We want to help bring that advantage to every independent business we serve.

Independent businesses are the heartbeat of South Africa. They are where people gather, celebrate milestones, build relationships and create experiences that stay with us long after we leave.

These businesses power a huge part of the economy and support millions of jobs across the country. Yet they are often the last to benefit from major technology shifts.

We believe AI will fundamentally reshape how independent businesses operate over the next decade. It will help owners reduce operational complexity, identify important trends earlier, automate repetitive work and make better decisions in ways that were previously only accessible to large enterprises.

But as with previous technology waves, the earliest benefits of AI are largely being prioritised for affluent consumers and large enterprises, while smaller businesses are left trying to catch up later.

At Yoco, we believe that needs to change.

Just as we helped democratise access to digital payments, we see a similar opportunity with AI. We want independent businesses to have access to the same quality of tools, intelligence and infrastructure as the world’s largest companies, but built for their unique realities and workflows.

Most business owners didn’t start their business because they love admin or operational complexity. They started it because they love creating something meaningful for people. Great technology should give them more time to focus on that part.

Few things are more energizing than when exceptional founders choose to join our movement and multiply their impact. Bringing together deeply mission-aligned builders allows us to move faster and create better products for the businesses we serve.

By joining Yoco, the Dyner team will continue building the platform independently while gradually integrating go-to-market, operational and support capabilities into Yoco’s broader platform and merchant ecosystem. The partnership will allow Dyner to leverage Yoco’s infrastructure, scale and merchant reach to accelerate AI adoption across more than 200,000 merchants and beyond.

“We founded Dyner with the belief that independent businesses deserve the same quality of operational technology and intelligence historically reserved for large enterprises,” said Thalentha, Co-Founder & CEO of Dyner.ai. “After spending extensive time alongside restaurant operators, we are convinced that AI will fundamentally reshape how independent businesses operate over the next decade. Joining Yoco gives us the infrastructure, reach and platform to accelerate that vision at a far greater scale.”

Looking forward to this next chapter.