One more vote {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? The ticketing app our team built is up for the Startup of the Year award. It processed over R1 million before its 6-month birthday, so we think it deserves it. If you agree, vote for it here. 🫡

In This Open Letter

Cable thieves hit SA's rail network around 17 times a day, forcing SA trains and railways into degraded mode – so this local venture built a "worthless" sensor to help fight it…

South Africa manages 21'000 km of railway, the biggest in Africa, and about 12th globally. Yet most of it runs blind, and the same thieves who happily strip an R800k transformer for a few thousand Rand's worth of copper target railways, too.

Transnet logged 6,345 security incidents in 2024/25 (~17 per day), more than 90% of them on its freight rail network. And Stellenbosch logistics professor Jan Havenga reckons Transnet's inefficiencies cost around R1 billion a day (maybe even 4.9% of SA's GDP).

Now, Siemens (yes, a division of the phone maker from the 90s) has, over the last decade-plus, been helping modernise SA's rail with digital signalling and automation, which is where a rail engineer saw an opportunity…

The problem, from the inside

15-year Siemens rail veteran Tian Kunneke saw serious accidents traced back to stolen trackside sensors. But every fix he found abroad came loaded with batteries, solar panels and copper (basically a shopping list for local thieves).

So he rang up Franz Struwig (the SA founder who'd sold his radar company iKubu to Garmin), and together they developed and patented the pulse method, which fires a tiny electrical pulse into the rail and uses its echo to detect trains or breaks in the track.

They then secured funding from the Technology Innovation Agency to turn their prototype into a product. The key thing, though, was intentionally making that product worthless before co-founding…

The rail sensor giving SA's railways their eyes back

HisWay Labs is a local rail-tech venture building TrackView, a solar-powered sensor that clips onto railway sleepers and keeps an eye on up to 2km of track for broken rails and passing trains.

The trick is that the sensor itself is worthless to thieves: it has less than R6 of scrap inside. It runs on supercapacitors instead of batteries, which outlast a battery many times over and are of no use to anyone trying to power something else.

The interesting bit is: the accelerometer inside was only meant for tamper detection, but once it hit the track, it started picking up flat wheels, dragging chains, loose ballast and even sleeper displacement. Data that's fast becoming worth more than the device itself to rail operators, and now HisWay Labs is also finding customers abroad.

What we like is that it was built with unique SA-made technology that removes the reason to steal instead of trying to protect against it. The data play could be a big one, so we're keen to learn more after they take it international – a second-time founder who's already exited to Garmin is defs someone to keep your eye on.

We're watching this space…

Have your say…

The Founder Collab just added three new ways for SA founders to make real progress, every single week.

1. Sprints: four weeks on one problem. Focused tracks on one area of your business, with an expert and a small group. First up is a Brand Sprint with Kim Furman, founder of Purple Panda: 5 founders, 1 hour every Thursday online, and the aim is positioning and GTM no competitors can match.

2. Circles: small groups facing the same problems. After a successful B2B test, four new Circles are open: Early Stage Product, Hardware & IoT, UX for Tech Products, and Somerset West, the first location-based Circle. Each checks in weekly on WhatsApp and meets monthly on Google Meet. With more coming soon…

3. Daily challenges and weekly tasks. Small, focused exercises to sharpen your product and business, plus weekly tasks drawn from 50+ hours of real founder lessons.

On top of that: R40k's worth of free business services and tools, company-expensable fees, and a refer-and-earn system that can make your membership free (or even become profitable).

Here is the test to hold yourself to: if a well-funded competitor copied your interface in 60 days, what advantage of yours would still be compounding half a year later? Protection does not hold on its own, and patents rarely save a startup.

And it turns out, the fix is a quarterly habit: ship one thing that makes existing customers more embedded, and one that makes new ones easier to reach.

🗳️ Results, Hour by Hour. As keen to know the election results as we are? Our friends at ESP built the ElectionsSePush tracker, with results coming in hourly, and The Outlier has one too.

🏦 Revolut Hits R1.9 Trillion. Revolut, which has applied for an SA banking licence, is now valued at $115bn (about R1.9tr), up 53%. It's aiming to launch here by 2028, with a local waitlist near 100'000. Cheap forex will likely be its opening pitch.

🛍️ Temu Wants You Selling. Temu is paying small creators up to 55% commission this Black Friday, open to anyone with 1'000 followers, South Africans included. It pays most for brand-new customers. Treat the headline rates as a ceiling, not a promise.

🏆 Engagement That Converts. Studio 88 used WhatsApp competitions to turn attention into action. Chat Inc drove 83% read rates, 23% button clicks and converted nearly 6% of clickers into competition entries. Want that kind of engagement?*

🧮 100 Apps You Didn't Commission. Take 1'000 staff, assume 10% build, and give each one an app. That's 100 apps your IT team didn't commission. You can block them and lose sight of them, or give them a governed lane. Salus Cloud will show you how in 30 minutes. Book your session →*

* From our partners. Find all the best service providers for your business in our Founder Stack.

Promoting your strongest engineer can backfire. Shipping great work doesn't automatically make someone a great manager. Get the call wrong, and you risk losing a strong individual contributor while gaining a manager who struggles to lead.

That's why OfferZen asked Gregor Ojstersek, creator of the Engineering Leadership newsletter, what to look for instead. His advice: look for the people already leading without the title, who spot improvements nobody asked for, take ownership beyond their own tasks and share knowledge rather than guard it.

Here's how to spot future leaders.

Yesterday, we showed you what SA used ChatGPT for in 2026, asking what you last asked it. Over half of you are using it as a diplomacy filter…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 📧 To make my email less passive-aggressive (55%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🍳 What to cook with three eggs and hope (9%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🧾 To explain my own job to me (36%)

Your 2 cents…

Same message, much better PR. That's the real ROI of AI right there. 📧

🧭 Head of Product @ admyt

⚙️ Platform Engineer @ The Awareness Company

📈 E-commerce Growth Strategist @ Old School

🎓 Software Developer @ Bag Learning

📋 Project Manager (Software) @ Octoco

What It Takes to Scale and Exit, 12 Nov, Cape Town: Pay@'s Andrew Hardie on building to a R1bn exit, plus Capitec, Quona and Katapult Ocean on building ventures in SA, at the Homecoming Centre. Get tickets.

Building Relationships for Funding, 13 Nov, Online: Zimi CEO Michael Maas on how he built angel relationships on the way to raising R50m. Join to get full access.

Meet Your Co-Founder, 19 Nov, Cape Town: OneBio brings scientists, clinicians, engineers and business minds together to form biotech founding teams. Apply here.

Powered by Radi. Want your business event in front of 36,000 The Open Letter readers? Host it on Radi, and it lands here.

🧩 Tool to Try: Zaro lets SA businesses pay and get paid internationally, as easily as a local EFT. It works in rands and dollars, to and from the US, UK and Europe.

🖖 That's Interesting: Patrick Stewart and his wife, Sunny Ozell, were married in a Mexican restaurant by Magneto from X-Men (aka, his actor friend, Mr Ian McKellen).