Kevin Damoa came face-to-face with the challenges and dangers of moving freight from road to rail as a 17-year-old U.S. Army enlistee tasked with loading tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles onto the railroad. It was — as the mechanical engineer and founder of Glīd Technologies puts it — the beginning of his love story with logistics.
It’s a love story that persisted through a 13-year stint with the U.S. Air Force National Guard as a firefighter 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 spinoff Serial 1, that Damoa circled back to the road-to-rail problem.
“I had my come-to-Jesus moment,” Damoa recalled of the pivotal moment when he decided to strike out on his own. “I looked around the globe, and I was like, ‘OK, rail is broken, ports are really congested, roads are congested, the fatalities on roads are crazy. Why aren’t more folks using rail?’ And then, my 17-year-old self tapped me on the shoulder, was like, ‘Because it’s hard to get things from road to rail.’”
Damoa pinpointed the problem: the complex, multi-step process moving a container from a ship to a freight train. He founded Glīd Technologies to try and solve it. The California-based startup (pronounced Glide) is among the 20 Startup Battlefield finalists competing at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025.
Glīd isn’t trying to compete with trains. Instead, the company is focused on that first mile from port to railroad 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 ships and stack up your containers and then figure out where they’re intended to go to. That process is still broken and involves a bunch of steps.”
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