Glid, a venture aiming to revolutionise the logistics sector by developing self-driving, autonomous vehicles designed to move freight efficiently around railyards, is International Finance’s Start-up of the Week. These autonomous vehicles handle freight movement within railyards. The company’s founder, Kevin Damoa, served in the US military, where he executed railhead operations during “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Then he went on to serve as a Firefighter and Logistics Officer in the United States Air Force, sustaining distributed, multi-domain operations that demanded precise, resilient supply.
From April 2012 to November 2015, Damoa served as the Flight Module Logistics Manager at Elon Musk-led SpaceX, developing the private space player’s logistics systems and programmes, apart from designing and deploying the venture’s shipping apparatus that was used to transport the rocket from production to the launch site. After that, he served one year at American military aviation giant Northrop Grumman, following which Damoa worked as an executive and early founding employee at start-ups like Romeo Power, XOS Trucks, Canoo, and Serial 1 Cycle/Harley-Davidson, where he led product development and design, manufacturing deployment, and product launches.
What was common in Damoa’s stints at SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, and Harley-Davidson’s Serial 1 Cycle Company: he noticed the universal structural flaw of first-mile logistics remaining fragmented and dangerous, with road and rail functioning as silos (segments operating in isolation).
The answer he pitched here was Glid, which got created in 2022 to correct that flaw with a rail-first, dual-mode architecture that merges advanced vehicles with a coordinating intelligence layer, while putting clean energy and autonomous technologies at the core of these innovations.
Dual-Mobility Platforms
Glid’s operational ecosystem’s goal is dead clear here: synchronising road and rail to cut logistics costs by 40% and boost throughput by 60%. In that direction, the start-up has introduced three integrated technologies that are transforming first-mile logistics from a bottleneck into a competitive advantage.
“GliderM,” which eliminates forklifts and yard equipment. The solution transitions from highway to rail in under two minutes, apart from possessing abilities like handling 20-foot containers directly and operating with or without a driver. Certified for both highway and rail operations, GliderM comes equipped with a 40,000 lb (20-ton) hooklift for containers, swap bodies (standardised, interchangeable freight containers in logistics used primarily for efficient road and rail transport), and bins (designated storage locations or containers used to organise, store, and track inventory), with software-powered autonomy supervising the entire load-in and load-out operations. The entire technology replaces an entire yard’s worth of equipment and does it faster, safer, and cheaper.
Next is “Raden,” an autonomous dual-mode vehicle, hailed as a game-changer for contested logistics and first-mile delivery. The armoured, low-profile platform is known for sliding under any trailer, lifting it, and moving it seamlessly between road and rail in 90 seconds. It has a hybrid powertrain with a propellant-agnostic range extender for 24/7 operations.
Raden can go SOLO (single-mode transport) mode for individual missions and PAK mode for convoy operations. It can go modular for carrying payloads like cargo, medevac, and drone operations, apart from having a silent running capability for sensitive operations. Raden also brings autonomy to the first mile while removing the infrastructure-related requirements.
Also, “EZRA-1SIX,” Glid’s in-house “AI Logistics Orchestrator,” which coordinates vehicles, schedules yards, optimises routes, and, apart from making pricing transparent, all while providing real-time visibility and verified emissions tracking.
“EZRA-1SIX” provides logistics operators a single operational picture across all assets and locations by enabling fleet mesh networking for coordinated operations. The “AI Logistics Orchestrator” possesses predictive billing that eliminates demurrage surprises (unexpected, costly fees charged when shipping containers aren’t picked up from ports or terminals within the allowed “free time”), while providing military-grade security with blockchain audit trails.
Solving First And Last Miles
Rail is known for moving a ton of freight with far less fuel and lower external costs than trucking. However, shippers often forgo rail because local service is unreliable, while transloading becomes cumbersome. While the United States’ “Staggers Rail Act” stabilised the industry and created space for shortlines, it also fostered an environment in which consolidation and margin discipline sometimes eclipsed growth and service.
“Shortlines now hold the keys to organic expansion; they are close to customers, skilled at local service, and capable of pre-blocking traffic for mainlines. What they lack is a set of tools that make first-mile rail as simple as calling a truck,” Glid noted.
Glid wants to unlock the network “already in the ground” and its elements like shortline mileage, dormant sidings and spurs, port-adjacent yards, and industrial aprons. Explaining the approach, the start-up noted, “Rather than insisting on new fixed transload terminals as a prerequisite to growth, Glid vehicles and software create capability where the freight already is, transforming the first mile from a sequence of specialised machines into a single, instrumented move.”
For logistics players and shippers, Glid cuts first-mile costs by 30-40% through consolidated operations and the elimination of multiple handling equipment. EZRA-1SIX offers right-sized tariffs based on actual physics and network capacity, eliminating demurrage surprises, thereby making the whole pricing model predictable and transparent.
At the same point in time, the solution increases logistics throughput (the volume of goods, products, or work processed through a warehouse or supply chain within a specific time) by 8-12 container moves per hour, as opposed to the traditional three to five moves. The seamless road-to-rail conversion eliminates expensive transload terminals by using existing warehouse aprons as micro-terminals.
EZRA-1SIX’s orchestration layer, most importantly, provides auditable performance metrics, apart from recovering billions in working capital by reducing railcar dwell times from 48-72 hours to under 24 hours.
For stakeholders in the logistics sector who depend on the rail network for seamless goods movement, Glid makes investments cost-friendly by activating underutilised sidings, spurs, and industrial aprons. Another area where the start-up’s expertise comes in handy is the domain of origination points (specific physical locations where a shipment officially begins its journey and is first received by a carrier for delivery to the final point of consumption), as it multiplies these points, especially for shortlines, without waiting on new concrete infrastructure.
Glid also handles operations of “Class I Carriers,” the largest players in North America’s railway network, through EZRA-1SIX’s pre-blocking optimisation, ensuring things remain punctual and increasing the rail modal share as well.
Making Ports Great Again
Through Glid’s EZRA-1SIX, ports and infrastructure players are witnessing a 60% throughput increase at terminals by eliminating intermediate handling equipment. Another benefit has been 20%–30% more container movements per acre through road-siding deployments that bypass traditional infrastructure.
GliderM, on the other hand, is compressing crane-to-rail dwell, apart from shortening gate queues through the solution’s direct container-to-rail spotting. Most importantly, since going green has been one of the operational mottos of the 21st-century global economy, a 10-unit GliderM fleet is helping American ports reduce 15,000–20,000 metric tons of CO₂ per year by replacing diesel hostlers. Hardened aprons, meanwhile, are being converted into functional micro-terminals with EZRA-1SIX’s software-scheduled operations.
Also, ports and infrastructure players, through Glid’s help, are scaling their operations incrementally, using existing infrastructure and the start-up’s mobile platforms.