Octoco Group has taken a strategic equity stake in HisWay Labs, the Cape Town company behind TrackView, a sensor that monitors railway tracks for breaks and tracks train positions. The size of the stake and the amount invested have not been disclosed.

Octoco managing director Heinrich de Lange says HisWay Labs has turned one of South Africa's most damaging infrastructure problems into a globally competitive product, and that backing it is a chance to show world-class industrial hardware can come from here.

TrackView was designed around theft. The sensor is solar-powered and contains no copper cabling and no batteries, the two components that make conventional trackside equipment a target. It is bolted to a sleeper inside steel housing and uses the rail itself as a sensing medium to detect broken rails and report a train's position, speed and length.

Chief executive Franz Struwig explained the logic to Freight News in 2023: "The incidents on our rail network are predatory and not sabotage," meaning thieves go after equipment because the copper, batteries and solar panels are easy to sell. His answer was to make the device hard to remove and worthless once removed.

The product has moved well past the lab. TrackView has certification and product type approval from the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa, has been deployed commercially with Siemens Mobility, is in field trials in the United States, and was exhibited at InnoTrans in Germany, the world's largest transport technology fair, in September. Struwig previously co-founded radar company iKubu, which was acquired by Garmin.

Octoco's portfolio includes TaxTim, LeaseSurance and Squirrel Away.

Disrupt Africa reported the investment and the company's plans for international expansion. Freight News carried Struwig's explanation of the vandal-resistant design, including the sensor's 4km sensing range and tamper detection. Business Tech Africa notes the gap TrackView targets: a broken rail or stolen signalling equipment can leave an operator unaware of what is happening on a section of line even when the track does not look damaged.

The export case rests on a real global shift, not only on South African crime. Rail operators worldwide are replacing old track circuits with axle counters, which detect trains better but lose the broken-rail detection that track circuits provided as a by-product. So operators everywhere now need a separate way to spot a broken rail, and South Africa's theft problem forced HisWay Labs to build one that survives conditions most markets never see.

It is the same pattern as Aura exporting a response network built for South African conditions. Locally, the stakes are freight. Rail failures have pushed goods onto roads at the same time as South Africa imports most of its diesel, so every ton moved back to rail matters. The test from here is commercial scale, because certification and pilots are the start of a hardware business, not proof of one.

You might also like our piece on the electric trucks testing SA's freight routes, Squirrel Away listing its own fund on the JSE, and what SA venture exits actually return.

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