In this episode of the Sunny Ray Show, Kevin Damoa, founder and CEO of Glide Technologies, joins Sunny Ray to discuss reinventing rail logistics. Damoa traces his path from doing railhead operations in the Army at age 17 after 9/11, to working inside SpaceX and on Northrop Grumman's F-35 program, to leading engineering and manufacturing for Harley-Davidson's Serial One ebike company. He explains how these experiences shaped Glide, a veteran owned deep tech company building autonomous road to rail vehicles, the Glider and Raiden, powered by an AI orchestration system called Ezra 16. Damoa describes Glide as the operating layer connecting road, rail, yard, port, and defense logistics, eliminating the costly transload process that has burdened freight for decades. He shares how Glide applies first principles thinking borrowed from aerospace, discusses the company's TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield win and backing from investor Tim Draper, and argues that unlocking underused rail capacity could transform global trade, especially for developing nations. The conversation also covers deployment realities, AI's current limitations in freight, and Damoa's vision for upskilling logistics workers rather than replacing them.
SpaceX and Northrop alum Kevin Damoa explains how Glide Technologies is building autonomous vehicles to bridge road and rail logistics.
What are you building?
We are building the world's first autonomous road to rail solution, an infrastructure layer that bridges road and rail. We service ports, railroads, industrial parks and agriculture on the commercial side, and we're a dual use company that services the war fighter in garrison and theater. Our products combine hardware and software to bring logistics into current times.
What was the first project where moving heavy things stopped being a job and became the problem you wanted to solve?
I was first exposed to the problem at seventeen doing railhead operations in the Army right after 9/11. But it clicked at SpaceX, which showed me what logistics really means, taking satellites and transporting them to space. Running those operations across every mode of transportation is when I truly fell in love with it and started the path toward Glide.
What did aerospace teach you about moving mass that commercial freight still hasn't learned?
It taught me more rigor and how to evolve with the times. Our logistical systems have been around for hundreds of years and a lot are stuck in the past. Aerospace challenges an entire industry to be better at what it builds, and we apply that same methodology to legacy systems without putting a toll on people to move their commerce from point to point.
Why go where almost nobody wants to go, into some of the hardest hardware problems in freight?
I believe the Lord provided me with the skills and experiences needed to facilitate it, and no one was solving it. Everyone was building in local optima, a next gen train cart or truck, which just added more complexity for loglisticians in a market still foreign to that regulation. I took my background and found a faster path to make existing infrastructure actually work.
What was the moment you decided to stop building for others and start your own thing?
I was at Harley-Davidson's ebike company, Serial One, helping with engineering, manufacturing and distribution during 2020. Our bikes sat on the ocean for months because ports couldn't get them in fast enough, and labor shortages compounded it. That was my come to Jesus moment, realizing I could solve this bottleneck for everyone at a much larger scale, and that's when I left to build Glide.
There's a huge autonomous trucking gold rush right now. Why is the consensus wrong about rail?
Rail is harder to break into, it's old, predatory and heavily unionized, so it's unattractive to new incumbents compared to road. But if you zoom out, unlocking latent rail capacity in the US and in underdeveloped countries like Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya lets them access their railroads for what they were built for, lowering logistics costs and turning them into real economic powers.
How much of the hard problem is the robotics versus the orchestration intelligence deciding what moves where and when?
The hardware is actually the easier side now given how far drive by wire and autonomous heavy hauling have come across the industry. The tough side is the software integration, the AI orchestration that pairs static infrastructure like roads and rails with all the dynamic nodes and sequences it effectively in a very dynamic environment. That's what Ezra 16 does inside the Glider universe.
What does deployment actually look like on the ground right now?
It's intentional, slow and tedious. We have a human in the loop at every step, a person inside the Glider vehicle and ground crews for transitions from road to rail. Raiden is driven completely by remote as we capture vehicle dynamics and tendencies before we turn on level four autonomy, so we can predict and engineer out failure modes.
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