Heinrich de Lange Is Building Rail Technology Designed for Africa’s Toughest Infrastructure Challenges

South Africa’s railway infrastructure has faced years of challenges, from ageing systems and unreliable equipment to theft and vandalism. Cape Town-based HisWay Labs is taking a different approach: instead of adapting conventional rail technology to local conditions, the company is building monitoring equipment specifically for the realities of African rail networks.

Founded in 2018, HisWay Labs developed TrackView, a rail-integrity monitoring system designed to detect problems with railway infrastructure and train positioning in real time. The technology has now attracted strategic investment from technology investment and product development firm Octoco Group as the company prepares to expand internationally.

TrackView was designed around a problem that conventional railway equipment often struggles with in South Africa: infrastructure can be exposed to extreme heat, dust, flooding, tampering and theft.

The company’s solar-powered sensor contains no copper cabling or batteries, two components that can make traditional trackside equipment attractive targets for theft. Instead, HisWay Labs designed the system to continue monitoring railway conditions while reducing some of the maintenance and security challenges associated with conventional infrastructure.

The result is a piece of industrial technology built around local constraints rather than treating them as afterthoughts.

TrackView has already received formal certification and product type approval from the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa. It has also been deployed commercially in partnership with Siemens Mobility, giving the technology a foothold within an established global rail ecosystem.

HisWay Labs is now beginning to take the technology beyond South Africa. The company is conducting field trials in the United States and is exhibiting at InnoTrans in Germany, one of the world’s major transport technology events, as it seeks European distribution and partnerships with railway operators.

The international push follows strategic funding from Octoco Group, which is supporting the company as it prepares for expansion.

For HisWay Labs, the opportunity is bigger than selling another railway sensor. The company is demonstrating how infrastructure problems that are particularly severe in African markets can become the starting point for globally relevant engineering products.

That is an important distinction in the continent’s technology story. Much of Africa’s startup ecosystem has been built around software, fintech and consumer applications, but infrastructure increasingly requires a different kind of innovation — hardware capable of surviving the physical, environmental and operational conditions in which it will actually be used.

HisWay Labs is building in that space.

Its technology also reflects a broader principle in African engineering: products designed for difficult environments can have applications well beyond the markets where they were first developed.

A sensor that can operate despite heat, dust, flooding and deliberate tampering is not only useful in South Africa. Those same characteristics could make it relevant to railway operators in other emerging markets where infrastructure faces similar pressures.

The company is therefore attempting to turn a local infrastructure challenge into an exportable technology solution.

As HisWay Labs moves into international markets, its journey offers another example of African technology being built from the ground up around problems that are often treated as uniquely local — and then tested for their potential to solve similar problems elsewhere.

For Heinrich de Lange and the team behind HisWay Labs, the ambition is no longer simply to make South African railways more resilient. It is to prove that technology developed in response to Africa’s toughest infrastructure challenges can compete on a global stage.