Glīd is building an autonomous shortcut to move freight from road to rail — catch him at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

Kevin Damois came face-to-face with the challenges and dangers of moving freight from road to rail when he was a 17-year-old U.S. Army recruit assigned to load tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles onto the rails. It was, in the words of the mechanical engineer and founder of Glīd Technologies, the beginning of his love story for logistics.

It’s a love story that spanned his 13 years in the U.S. Air Force National Guard as a firefighter, all the way to his roles in the private sector at SpaceX, Northrup Grumman, Romeo Power Tech, and Xos Trucks – to name a few.

But it wasn’t until 2022, while working on the Harley-Davidson e-bike brand Series 1, that Damo returned to the road-to-rail problem.

“I had a come-to-Jesus moment,” Damoa recalls of the pivotal moment when he decided to strike out on his own. “I looked around the world, and I said to myself, ‘Well, the railways are broken, the ports are really crowded, the roads are crowded, the deaths on the roads are crazy. Why don’t more people use the railways?’ And then, when I was 17, he tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Because it’s hard to move things from the road to the railway.”

Damois pointed out the problem: the complex, multi-step process that moves a container from a ship to a freight train. He founded Glīd Technologies to try to solve it. The California-based startup (pronounced Glide) is among 20 Startup Battlefield finalists competing at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025.

Glīd is not trying to compete with trains. Instead, the company is focusing on the first mile of port to rail, as well as road-to-rail applications within large industrial parks.

“The first mile is where all your problems happen,” he said. “This is where you unload your ships, stack your containers and then figure out where they’re going to go. It’s still a broken process and involves a bunch of steps.”

Once the ship arrives at port, a crane picks up a container and loads it onto a Hosteller truck, a vehicle used to maneuver short distances, where it is then moved into a high pile. The forklift picks up the container and moves it to the stack. Later, a forklift is used to load it back onto the Hostler truck, which then moves to the railway line. A forklift or crane is then used to pick up the container and load it onto the freight train, where it waits.

Glīd has developed several hardware and software products to speed up and reduce the cost of getting shipping containers to the railhead and ultimately to their destination. The first is the GliderM, a hybrid electric vehicle with a hook on the back that can pick up and move 20-foot containers directly to the rail without the need for host truck forklifts.

The startup is also developing logistics software and a low-profile armored platform called Rāden that can slide under any trailer, lift it and move autonomously along the route to the railway.

“You can look at us as stick riders,” he said, describing the system. “We’re delivering that load to the next middle mile; the name of the game is utilization — you know, how many containers can we get within that first mile, within a day, in order to maximize or optimize our costs.”

The cost structure is compelling. By eliminating forklifts and host trucks and using rail rather than semi-trucks for deliveries, Damoa said he is able to offer the company’s mobility-as-a-service system at a fraction of the cost. Customers are charged a $300,000 per year subscription, giving them access to GliderM or Rāden and their logistics software called EZRA-1SIX. Customers are also charged a fee of 8 cents per ton per mile. This is a bargain because companies get a train, truck and forklift in one machine, plus service, Damoa said. By comparison, the cost per ton per mile today — if tolls, trains and trucks are included — is about $2.27, according to Damoa.

The 14-person startup focuses on short-haul rail systems, ports that own the track, and industrial parks. Glīd has already signed deals with four short-haul railways as well as the Port of Woodland in Washington, Taylor Transport out of Vancouver, and the Great Plains Industrial Park, a 6,800-acre site in Kansas with 30 miles of inland rail lines and an on-site transportation facility.

Glīd’s technology and business model has also resonated with investors who see potential in the technology and business model.

Damoa said the first two years were difficult, noting that he couldn’t pay someone to invest in Glīd. But once he went through Antler’s startup accelerator program, which gave him important CEO and presentation skills, the startup achieved more success. Glīd received investment before building his first prototype.

The startup announced in July that it had raised $3.1 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Outlander VC, with participation from Draper U Ventures, Antler, The Veteran Fund, M1C and angel investors. It has since raised more, bringing its total to $7.1 million with a post-money valuation of $35 million.

If you want to learn more about Glīd from the company itself — while also checking out dozens of other companies, hearing their ideas, and hearing from guest speakers at four different stages — join us at Disrupt, October 27-29 in San Francisco. Learn more here.