Former SpaceX engineers bring the company to launch electric, self-propelled rail vehicles out of stealth
Parallel Systems, a company founded by three former SpaceX engineers to build self-propelled battery-electric rail vehicles, launched a stealth mode on Wednesday with a Series A raise of $49.55 million la. The company, which has raised $53.15 million to date, including a $3.6 million seed round, is working to create a more efficient decarbonized freight network, running on existing rail infrastructure.
According to Co-Founder and CEO Matt soul.
Parallel Systems also intends to use the new investment – led by Anthos Capital and including investments from Congruent Ventures, Riot Ventures, Embark Ventures and others – to hire around 60 engineers, most of them they will handle the software, Soule said.
The startup’s rail vehicle architecture aims to solve a few problems: carbon emissions in the transportation of goods, constraints in the supply chain of trucking and rail freight limits. United States, the rail network accounts for 28% of total freight traffic, but most of it was mass movement – large trains that moved primary resources like coal and wood. A smaller part of rail freight operations known as intermodal operations, which essentially involve the movement of steel containers between a range of different modes of transport, such as ships and boats. vans.
“Railways have a lot of room for growth when it comes to intermodal and we’re focused on this because this is where we think there’s competition and a thirst for innovation,” Soule said. TechCrunch.
Parallel’s patent-pending vehicle architecture involves individually powered carriages that can load and transport standard shipping containers as single loads or stacked. They can join together to form “platoons” or detach to multiple destinations while on the road, meaning they don’t need to hold large volumes of cargo to make the service economical, though Soule say they can actually carry much heavier loads than trucks, which handle most of the freight operations in the US
“For the unit economics of freight trains to compete with trucks, you need really long trains, and you’re allocating the cost of that locomotive and crew relative to that,” says Soule. That’s a really long train. “When that becomes an issue is when you’re figuring out where to park that big ship, and the answer is, not many places.”
Relying on long trains for freight means it’s hard to make high-volume trains handle all of our e-commerce wonders because those trains aren’t urban communities or ports are always accessible. Soule says it requires large terminals to be built specifically to accommodate their physical size.
“Our unit economics doesn’t depend on a very large train,” says Soule. “We can move in smaller platoons and instead of staying all day for unloading, we’ll be in and out within an hour or two, leaving room for other platoons to come in. That’s the mark. more efficient footing and it enables things like servicing ports and creating an inland port shuttle system so you can move containers from seaport to inland port, which is usually a better place for trucks to travel and closer to warehouse operations.”
When it comes to autonomy, Parallel sees the closed network of railways as the ideal operational design area for the early and safe commercialization of autonomous technology due to limited access to rails and centralized traffic control. central. However, it’s important to note that while Parallel’s long-term vision looks promising, the company has yet to test it on national networks – it has tested its prototype vehicle on a single route. The small railroad in Los Angeles is isolated from the national network.
Railroads in the US are privately owned by operating owners, which makes it difficult for Parallel to test its vehicles and autonomous systems to operate the vehicles on a large scale. The parallel is to target private railway companies as its customers, hoping to sell or lease its tools to help them run their day-to-day service while also playing a supporting role in technology delivery and integration. Until the startup gets a former rail partner on board, it won’t be able to tell if its technology can handle real-world operations.
The early-stage company is a few years away from developing technology that can hit the market, says Soule, but it has a chance to own this part of the market, especially as shippers around the world. The world not only wants to transport goods faster, but also cleaner. freight.
The company’s platoon technology features self-propelled rail cars pushing against each other to distribute the load, which the company predicts will result in Parallel vehicles using only 25% more energy than pickup trucks.
“The basic reason we’re doing this is to accelerate the decarbonization of freight, but the problem we see is that the scale of rail operations is limited to a market that doesn’t exist,” says Soule. it can serve. “So we’re trying to take advantage of this energy efficiency, but then break down its economic and operational barriers at the same time. And by the way, we’re manufacturing our powertrains. electricity, which further accelerates the decarbonization benefits because our grid itself isn’t clean, so when you look at it diesel oil trucks, compared to what we’re building and looking at real-world average CO2content of the US grid, we will reduce CO . by 90%2 per mile to move one unit of cargo using our technology compared to today’s diesel trucks. “
