Hair-raisingly high stakes

Kevin Damoa knows logistics. For 23 years he’s been in the business of getting things from A to B, with a CV that spans the US military, California firefighting services and SpaceX. While on deployment in Iraq, Damoa was responsible for shifting Abrams and Bradley tanks onto railheads – a cumbersome, dangerous, but critical job. As flight module logistics manager for SpaceX, he was the guy tasked with ensuring that the rocket – and everything on board – made it safely to the launch site. The stakes were hair-raisingly high. “You were transporting this priceless thing that took six or seven months to build,” he says. “If we damaged it on the road, there would be no launch. If we destroyed one…it was like ‘bye bye company’.” 

Observing logistics and supply chains up close, moving everything and anything “from space to air to ocean to rail to road and back again,” Damoa began to notice gaps and inefficiencies. In recent years, a great deal of attention has been given to “last mile” logistics – the stage of a journey in which a product is delivered to its customer. But Damoa could see that the area in most desperate need of innovation was the “first mile” – the stage in which a product is transported from its point of origin – a supplier or manufacturer – to a distribution center. Simply getting a product from a boat onto a train can be an extraordinarily convoluted process; with a unit being shifted from truck, to forklift, truck to forklift, and finally onto a train, which then has to wait until its load capacity reaches a high enough volume to depart.

“It can take about two weeks,” says Damoa. “Seven, eight steps, multiple pieces of equipment, a ton of diesel, and twenty plus personnel in order to move one piece of cargo. It's OpEx, CapEx heavy on the operator side. Then for the customer… it's typically from $650 to $1,500 per transload [each time the unit needs to be moved from one mode of transport to another]. And once the train departs, you get to the other side and the same thing happens in reverse.”

Rāden enters the ring

Damoa was determined to fix this pain point. In 2022 he founded Glīd, a startup dedicated to building an autonomous, electric road-to-rail vehicle designed to streamline first mile logistics. In July this year it launched its first vehicle, dubbed Rāden, a dual-mode platform that can transition seamlessly from the tarmac to the track. The uncrewed vehicle can carry loads of up to 10,000 pounds, travel at 65mph on road and 25 miles on rail and has an operational range of 600 miles. Most significantly, it can make the transitions between different modes without human intervention – removing a time-consuming and dangerous step, and reducing costs by up to 40%. Beyond commercial freight, Damoa envisions the vehicle being deployed in environments where traditional logistics break down, and would be of particular value for defense missions and disaster relief, where resilience and speed is critical. 

Glīd has also begun production of GliderM, a manned road-to-rail vehicle. Built on a heavy-duty truck chassis with hi-rail and container-handling systems, GliderM is designed for immediate deployment at rail yards and ports. It will be piloted later this year, giving customers access to Glīd’s technology while laying the groundwork for scaling autonomy with Rāden.

The process started with Damoa working alone. He “nerded out on CAD”, sketched out a prototype, and wrote up a “bulletproof” patent. Eventually, though, he realised he couldn’t be a one-man team. He began the process of fine-tuning the manpower that would take Glīd to the next level. After bringing on Matt Mueller, who has a background in aerospace, manufacturing, and clean mobility, as a co-founder, things “really took off”. Attending the Antler residency in 2024 sharpened Glīd’s business proposition into something that would pack a punch. “It really gave us that awareness of, you know, ‘this your go-to-market’, ‘this is how you talk to investors’, ‘this is your edge’”, says Damoa. “Then we became dangerous.”

Another big step was hiring Chaitali Narla as CTO a year later. Narla, who previously worked at Google and Stripe, is spearheading the development of Glīd’s vertically integrated technology strategy – namely EZRA-1SIX, its AI-first logistics software. Like Rāden, EZRA-1SIX is being built with dual-use applications in mind. The system functions as a full-stack logistics platform that can schedule, track, and optimize movements in ports and rail yards, while also adapting to defense and emergency missions where supply chains are under stress. By pairing with Glīd’s vehicles, it enables real-time coordination in both commercial freight corridors and contested environments.

The new rail

The speed at which Glīd has got its product from design to market is remarkable, but it was not without its challenges. Damoa had to let go of his aesthetic vision for the platform, and focus on meeting regulatory hurdles and designing something that was scalable. Damoa may have had experience working at numerous startups in the past, but as he points out, being a founder comes with a unique set of duties; as CEO to the company, as well as to employees and investors. “I can’t say, ‘actually this is your company – I’m just helping you out’,” he says. “It's terrifying on one end and freeing and enlightening on the other. Combining them both is like an engine, you know, it is like the air and fuel that combusts in a piston that drives a vehicle forward.”

Damoa likes to think of himself as a part of “the new rail”; he is pushing things forward in an industry that has traditionally been slow to change, but set to become more valuable than ever. The market for AI in transportation will triple from $2-6bn over the next five years, according to Numalis. The market for autonomous vehicles in supply chains is predicted to grow from around $40-50bn to $70bn+ over the same period. He is particularly proud of being a black innovator in a predominantly white sector. “I'm the only person in the rail industry that looks like me that's trying to change it,” he says. 

With its first product ready to roll, Damoa is gearing up to commercialize. Glīd just closed a $3.1m pre-seed round and is preparing to deploy its products in real-world settings. Since demonstrating Rāden and kicking off production of its manned GliderM fleet, Glīd has signed up five railroads, two trucking companies and two industrial parks, and is in conversation with others. Glīd is primed for its first revenue-generating year. Damoa is confident his vehicles are up to the task, but is both nervous and excited about seeing them in action for the first time – whatever the road, whatever the load. “No day is the same in logistics,” says Damoa. “That's why I love it so much.”

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