Former SpaceX engineers bring a self-driving electric rail vehicle startup to life.

Key Highlights

• Parallel Systems, a company created by three former SpaceX engineers to develop autonomous battery-electric rail vehicles, raised $49.55 million in a Series A round on Wednesday.
• The business has received $53.15 million to date, including a $3.6 million seed investment, and is developing a more efficient, decarbonized freight network that runs on top of current railway infrastructure.
• According to co-founder and CEO Matt Soule, the cash will be used to develop Parallel System's second-generation vehicle and to establish an advanced testing programme that will assist the business in determining how to incorporate its cars into real-world operations.
• The startup's rail vehicle architecture intends to address several issues: carbon emissions associated with freight, supply chain constraints associated with trucking, and limitations associated with railway freight.
• Parallel's patent-pending vehicle architecture entails self-propelled railcars capable of loading and transporting standard shipping containers in single or double stack configurations.

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Parallel Systems, a company created by three former SpaceX engineers to develop autonomous battery-electric rail vehicles, raised $49.55 million in a Series A round on Wednesday. The business has received $53.15 million to date, including a $3.6 million seed investment, and is developing a more efficient, decarbonized freight network that runs on top of current railway infrastructure.

According to co-founder and CEO Matt Soule, the cash will be used to develop Parallel System's second-generation vehicle and to establish an advanced testing programme that will assist the business in determining how to incorporate its cars into real-world operations.

Parallel Systems also expects to use the new investment — led by Anthos Capital and including Congruent Ventures, Riot Ventures, and Embark Ventures — to hire approximately 60 engineers, the majority of whom will work on software, according to Soule.

The startup's rail vehicle architecture intends to address several issues: carbon emissions associated with freight, supply chain constraints associated with trucking, and limitations associated with railway freight. The rail network in the United States accounts for 28% of all freight movement, although the majority of it is bulk transportation activity — huge trains that transport primary materials such as coal and lumber. A smaller fraction of rail freight movement is classified as intermodal activity, which entails the movement of steel containers between other means of transportation, such as boats and vehicles.

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Rail has a lot of room to expand in terms of intermodal, and we focus on this because we believe there is competition and a hunger for innovation in this space, "Soule.

Parallel's patent-pending vehicle architecture entails self-propelled railcars capable of loading and transporting standard shipping containers in single or double stack configurations. They can form "platoons" or branch off to several locations en route, which means they do not need to carry a lot of freight to be economically viable, although Soule claims they can carry significantly more weight than trucks, which handle the majority of freight transportation in the United States.

Soule explained that in order for freight train unit economics to be competitive with trucks, you need extremely long trains and you amortise the cost of the engine and crew over that extremely long train. When it becomes a difficulty, it's determining where to park that large train, and the answer is, there aren't many options.

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