A logistics startup called Glide uses an autonomous robot named Raden to lift truck trailers directly onto train tracks, replacing slow manual transloading that can take weeks. The company claims a world-first patent on this hardware-software combination and sees massive revenue potential in fixing the mismatch between congested roads and underused rail lines.
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The one that I was like, man, this is gonna make a ton of money, was Glide. I think that the potential logistics is such a huge space. Second for me was the satellites with fire. The past 70 years, the corridors between road and rail have been extremely broken. Road, extremely congested. Rail, severely underutilized. And the bridge between the two, transloading, is a process that is off whack, for lack of better words. It involves multiple pieces of equipment, trains, forklifts, dreads, trucks, an army of people. And a lot of capital costs. It takes a unit train 2 to 6 weeks in order to depart, and guess what? They charge you for it. What we've come up with is a very eloquent solution. Road and rail combined with hardware and software to unite, to synchronize, in order to solve the greatest problem that we have: logistics. The top vehicle that we have is an autonomous robotic unit called Raden. Raden has the ability to get any road-based trailer, any rail-based cart with little to no modification. And then the bottom vehicle is our manned vehicle called the Glider-M, and I'll show you exactly what that looks like. Raiden is a purpose-built vehicle able to get underneath any road-based trailer and then transport it directly on the rails. We are industry agnostic, so we're able to transport either as a solo or the pack. We have a patent for this technology as well, the only patent in the world. Say you're a port—