Top South African safety app adds family finder feature and major upgrades
Community Wolf, the owners of the popular Namola personal safety app, revealed a slate of major upgrades to the platform, including a feature to track loved ones.
Upgrades included an integration with the company’s new Safety Intelligence API, which provides users with new features, such as an alert that notifies users when loved ones enter a high-risk area.
With over 700,000 downloads, Namola offers free and subscription-based personal safety features, including an emergency panic button and safety alert notifications.
Namola was an offshoot of the StellieSafe platform, an early community safety app piloted in Stellenbosch by a team led by telecoms entrepreneur Alan Knott-Craig Jr.
After a development period, the Namola app was piloted in Tshwane in 2016 and launched nationally in 2017.
Broadcasting giant MultiChoice acquired Namola in 2022 as part of a later abandoned strategy to expand its ecosystem beyond entertainment.
In February 2025, the DStv owner sold Namola to South African digital safety infrastructure providers Aura for an undisclosed amount.
Formally known as Aura Services, the company aimed to make security and medical response services more accessible in South Africa and is behind several free mobile safety apps.
This included the Gauteng e-Panic Button App, launched by the Gauteng Department of e-Government in May 2023. It also integrates with Uber South Africa’s mobile app.
After just under a year with Namola, Aura sold the app to Community Wolf, a company whose platform allows South Africans to report suspicious activity using AI and WhatsApp.
“Community Wolf has acquired Namola, a platform many South Africans rely on in moments that matter, and Aura will continue powering Namola’s emergency-response network,” said Aura co-founder Warren Myers.
“Community Wolf’s AI capabilities, combined with Namola’s national reach powered by Aura, will make the service even more effective for users.”
Community Wolf buys Namola, launches SIA
As of December 2025, Namola was under the Community Wolf banner, alongside its co-founders, Nick Mills and Michael Houghton, who recently spoke to MyBroadband.
The pair said that new features had already been rolled out and were live on Namola, stemming from Community Wolf’s new Safety Intelligence API (SIA).
SIA is a newly developed distribution layer that aggregates data from multiple active sources to build a database of safety and crime activity information.
Houghton explained that it sourced data from the South African Police Service (SAPS) and other providers, as well as incident reports generated by Community Wolf and Namola itself.
The database also included sentiment data collected from various surveys in order to gauge how safe people feel in specific areas across the country.
With the data, the API can provide an underlying layer for other industries to use to drive digital safety technologies and platforms with live, on-the-ground risk ratings.
For Namola users, the API is integrated directly into the platform via a grid-like overlay on its map interface, which uses the database to highlight areas’ safety ratings.
“Anyone who has Namola will see this on the map in South Africa. They can toggle on a safety overlay, and that will basically put a grid over the whole of the country,” said Houghton.
“Each one of those grids has an associated risk score with it.”
The API also accounts for the built environment, including infrastructure such as streetlights, intersections, ATMs, and businesses like bars or taverns.
New features on South Africa’s most popular safety app
Mills and Houghton remarked that it was the only safety intelligence API in South Africa, to their knowledge. They explained that the API also benefits from Namola’s “contribution flywheel.”
As people use the app and report on incidents, such as spotting suspicious activity, the data from these reports feeds back into the SIA, adding to the dataset daily.
In the coming weeks, Namola will also roll out a new feature that can send notifications to users when their loved ones enter areas tagged as high risk by the API.
This will be accompanied by a “Find My” feature where users can track the live locations of their loved ones directly on the app.
“That will allow you as a user to set a threshold for, for example, your wife, and if she moves into a particular region, you will get an alert,” said Houghton.
“And from there, through Namola, you can obviously request help.”
All these features are available with Namola’s Essential subscription tier, which costs R30 per month. Free users can access limited features, but still gain access to the area risk grid.
Meanwhile, the Namola Plus tier, which costs R60 per month for an individual, R100 for a couple and R130 for a family of five, includes all tracking and safety features.
It also provides access to a network of private emergency response services, powered by Aura’s infrastructure, which can be alerted via the app’s panic button.
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