Autonomous freight service provider Glīd Technologies secures $3.1 million in its preliminary funding round.
Glid Technologies Launches Groundbreaking Road-to-Rail Solutions
Glid Technologies, a pioneering autonomous road-to-rail solutions company, is making waves in the logistics industry with its innovative products and recent funding. Founded in 2022, the company is led by Kevin A. Damoa, a former logistics leader at SpaceX and the U.S. military, and Jordan Kretchmer, Senior Partner at Outlander VC and Glīd board member.
The company aims to transform static rail corridors into dynamic, high-throughput delivery networks, addressing the issue of containers sitting idle for weeks while being transloaded between trucks, cranes, and storage yards. This results in increased labor, emissions, and delays, a problem that costs the global freight market dearly. With expectations for the market to exceed $20 trillion by 2033, the need for intelligent infrastructure has never been more pressing.
Glid Technologies is addressing this issue by eliminating the need for terminals, drayage, or lift equipment, enabling continuous, on-demand freight flow. The company's proprietary autonomous, dual-mode Glīders operate on both road and rail, transporting standard containers directly onto the rail network.
The company's latest innovations include two breakthrough products: Rāden and GliderM. Rāden, the world's first unmanned, hybrid-electric road-to-rail vehicle, is designed for complex, off-grid, and high-throughput environments where traditional vehicles struggle. It has a low-profile design with a clean LPG-based range extender, making it well-suited for such environments.
GliderM, on the other hand, is a manned, hybrid-electric road-to-rail vehicle purpose-built to move 20-foot containers and heavy payloads directly from road to rail without forklifts or extra transloading steps. Field deployment is planned for California and Washington in Q3 2025.
In addition to these vehicles, Glid Technologies has also debuted EZRA-1SIX, a proprietary AI-powered logistics orchestration platform. This platform enables real-time dispatch, multimodal autonomy, and secure human-in-the-loop operations, supporting both commercial and defense applications.
The $3.1 million pre-seed funding raised by Glid Technologies will be used to transition the company from R&D into real-world deployment with GliderM's launch, accelerate Rāden's development, expand EZRA-1SIX capabilities, grow engineering and business teams, and deepen strategic partnerships with ports, rail operators, and government agencies.
With these innovations, Glid Technologies aims to reclaim US freight innovation leadership by revitalizing underused infrastructure, harnessing tech for human insight, and reestablishing US dominance in freight innovation. The company is building the logistics infrastructure of tomorrow, aiming to be autonomous, resilient, and secure for both commercial and contested environments.
This transition marks Glid Technologies as a company focused on real-world deployment, not just research and development. The new investment in Glid Technologies will be used to launch new products, grow its engineering and business development teams, and deepen strategic partnerships. The addition of GliderM to its fleet, scheduled for field operations in Q3 2025 in California and Washington, is a testament to the company's commitment to revolutionizing the logistics industry.
- The latest funding secured by Glid Technologies will be directed towards transforming the company's research and development into real-world deployment with the launch of GliderM, accelerating Rāden's development, expanding EZRA-1SIX capabilities, growing engineering and business teams, and deepening strategic partnerships.
- Glid Technologies aims to revolutionize the logistics industry by reclaiming US freight innovation leadership, revitalizing underused infrastructure, harnessing technology for human insight, and reestablishing US dominance in freight innovation.
- The world's first unmanned, hybrid-electric road-to-rail vehicle, Rāden, is designed by Glid Technologies for complex, off-grid, and high-throughput environments, addressing the issues of lengthy delays and costs in the global freight market.
- Glid Technologies intends to address the problem of containers sitting idle for weeks in rail corridors by eliminating the need for terminals, drayage, or lift equipment, enabling continuous, on-demand freight flow using its autonomous, dual-mode Glīders.
- With the addition of GliderM, a manned, hybrid-electric road-to-rail vehicle, to its fleet and planned field deployment in California and Washington in Q3 2025, Glid Technologies is demonstrating its commitment to revolutionizing the logistics industry, leveraging innovation, finance, business, and real-estate while embracing data-and-cloud-computing and technology.
