Glīd

Dear Founders, At BVVC, we back the rails… A our Nation runs on. - This week the map of trade narrowed in three places at once. #Hormuz weighed for a wider war. Bab el-Mandeb turned selective, sparing some hulls and warning others. The Black Sea halted its loadings and the Caspian pipeline went dark. Brent closed over $100 for the first time since May. - For a decade the fear was the strait. Now it is everything the strait feeds. Washington answered by ordering the Pentagon to map every defense supply chain to its source, down to the last single sourced part. When the water closes, the cargo does not stop needing to move. It just needs another way through. - That other way is already built. It runs on the road and the rail a country already owns. Glīd, founded by Kevin A. Damoa, moves the trailer and the container across both, autonomously, on the infrastructure that exists. No new terminals, no new rolling stock to wait years for. Just freight that keeps moving the day the water closes. - This is #ThePhysicalCentury, and its supply lines are physical too. Resilience is not a bigger warehouse. It is a network that reroutes faster than an adversary can close a lane. #Autonomy. #Logistics. #DefenseLogistics. A supply chain is worth what it keeps moving on the day the map narrows. BVVC is a Fund in the Field™ for National Security. Let’s go build, forge, fight and WIN! With great respect, The Teams at BVVC #NationalSecurity #AutonomousSystems #Logistics #SupplyChainResilience #Mobility #DefenseLogistics #ThePhysicalCentury #Glid #WATCHUSBUILD

The last couple of days in Houston reminded me why I love this industry. From the Texas Short Line and Regional Railroad Association (TSLRRA) Happy Hour to today’s The Rail Luncheon Series , I had the opportunity to spend time with people from every corner of the railroad business. Conversations with railroaders, customers, suppliers, and industry leaders all reinforced the same truth… Shortlines are the backbone of American railroading!! I’ll say it loud and proud 👊 While the Class I railroads move freight across the continent, short lines are the ones serving the communities, industrial parks, manufacturers, and customers that keep local economies alive. They solve problems that don’t make headlines, create opportunities where others see obstacles, and build relationships that last for decades. What has always impressed me about shortline railroading is that it has never just been about moving railcars. It’s about serving customers. Knowing their business. Finding a way to make rail work when it would be easier to say no. The future of freight transportation will be built on innovation, but innovation only succeeds when it’s grounded in strong partnerships. That’s exactly what I saw this week. People willing to share ideas, challenge assumptions, and work together to make our industry stronger. I’m grateful for every conversation, every handshake, and every new connection. Events like these remind me that rail is still, and always will be, a relationship business. Here’s to the men and women on the short lines who keep freight moving one customer, one community, and one railroad at a time. We don’t build this industry from boardrooms. We build it one relationship, one customer, and one mile of track at a time!! #Railroading #ShortLineRailroad #TSLRRA #FreightRail #RailIndustry #RailRoadSensei #Glīd

From SpaceX Rockets to Reinventing Freight: How Kevin A. Damoa Is Rebuilding the First Mile of Global Logistics For decades, the logistics industry has chased efficiency at the edges of the supply chain. Companies have optimized warehouse automation, digitized inventory systems, and transformed last-mile delivery into a technological arms race. Yet believes the industry’s biggest opportunity has remained largely untouched. “The first mile is where everything begins,” he says. “If you solve it there, you’re walking into the same line as your last mile, and everybody’s happier for it.” https://lnkd.in/ghGcgJ3M

This conversation meant a lot to us. We are deeply grateful to Brian Lofrumento, Entrepreneur, Speaker, and Author for the care, curiosity, and energy he brought to this conversation with our CEO. Brian created space to go beyond the headlines and talk honestly about the journey from military service to SpaceX, the failures and lessons along the way, and the responsibility behind building Glīd. At the center of the episode is a simple idea: meaningful systems are built by people willing to keep learning, keep serving, and keep moving the mission forward. Thank you, Brian, and the entire Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur team, for telling this story with intention and for building a platform where entrepreneurs can learn from one another. Listen here: https://lnkd.in/eGMtf8QV #Entrepreneurship #FreightForwarding #SupplyChain

Featured event session: The Startup Showcase 🎙️ Four companies get eight minutes each. In a room filled with people who know the industry, inside and out. Only at #AUTONOMOUS2026. Final tier tickets → autonomousfuture.co Our full agenda → https://lnkd.in/eeBCB2vh Happening on The Frontier Stage, we'll be joined by PSYONIC, led by Aadeel Akhtar, PhD Akhtar, builds the Ability Hand, a touch-sensing bionic hand that gives amputees back a sense of grip and is already used by more than 50 robotics companies to give their machines the same feedback. The rare piece of hardware that serves humans and robots from the same design. Recent collaborations include industrial giants ABB - A bold move forward for the hand focused startup. Andromeda, led by Grace Brown, makes Abi, a social companion robot deployed in aged care homes to sit with residents who would otherwise spend the day alone. Most recent raise of $23M Series A led by Forerunner, with an approach to a largely untapped market that no one in robotics has really considered. Glidance, led by Amos Miller, builds Glide, a self-guided mobility aid for people who are blind or have low vision. Miller, who lost his sight in his twenties and founded Microsoft's Soundscape, built the device around a problem he lives with every day. Glīd, led by Kevin A. Damoa, automates the first mile of freight, the messy handoff where a container moves from road to rail. Founded by a US Army and SpaceX veteran, Glid won the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025. Bionics, companionship, accessibility, freight. Four founders who could not be building more different things, on the same stage, presenting to the same crowd, because each one is early enough to be a part of the room that matters. #PhysicalAI #CapitalFunding #startups #Automation #Roboticsnews #robotics #AIevent #AUTONOMOUS 

Our Founder and CEO, Kevin A. Damoa, will be speaking at AUTONOMOUS: The Future of Robotics & Physical AI next Thursday in San Francisco. Kevin’s path to Glīd took him through the U.S. Army, SpaceX, and Northrop Grumman. Each environment reinforced the same lesson: The hardest logistics problems are often not the ones that appear difficult. They are the constraints an industry has accepted for so long that they stop being questioned. The road-to-rail handoff is one of those constraints. The infrastructure exists. The freight exists. The demand exists. What has been missing is an integrated system that allows freight to move between road and rail without the equipment, labor, delays, and coordination overhead that make multimodal operations impractical at scale. That is the system Glīd is building. On July 16, Kevin will share more about the operational problem behind the work and what physical AI looks like when it moves beyond demonstration and begins executing against real infrastructure. Thank you to Rohan Savla for the invitation. ➡️ autonomousfuture.co #PhysicalAI #Robotics #AutonomousSystems #Logistics #RoadToRail #Glīd

America did not lose its need for rail. We lost access to too much of it. Dormant lines became trails. Communities lost freight movement, industry, and economic gravity. The road-to-rail seam became harder to use, so the system defaulted to trucks, congestion, and fragmented first-mile operations. At Glīd, we see those lines differently. We see existing infrastructure waiting to be reconnected through autonomous road-to-rail logistics, cleaner movement, and fewer handoffs. Thank you Gary Hensley for a great conversation on 50 Chairs and for giving space to the origin story behind the mission. Glīd is not a nostalgia project. It is a way to put rail back to work for commerce, communities, and national resilience. Watch here: https://lnkd.in/eeC6Ex_R #Glīd #RoadRail #Logistics #Reindustrialization #AutonomousLogistics