Parallel Systems Emerges From Stealth With $50 Million For Autonomous Electric Trains—But Will Its Plan Work?

David Shultz

David Shultz reports on clean technology and electric vehicles, among other industries, for dot.LA. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, Nautilus and many other publications.

Parallel Systems
Image courtesy of Parallel Systems

Parallel Systems has big dreams for the future of railway freight operations, and it seems that the venture capital world has taken notice.

The Los Angeles-based transportation startup announced a $49.55 million Series A funding round as it emerged from stealth mode on Wednesday. The round was led by Anthos Capital, with additional investments from the likes of Congruent Ventures, Riot Ventures and Embark Ventures.

Comprised of former SpaceX, Google and Tesla engineers, Parallel Systems is aiming to develop autonomous and electric freight train cars that would make the American shipping industry greener and more efficient.


“We’ve been pretty quiet about what we’ve been doing,” Parallel Systems CEO Matt Soule, formerly the principal avionics engineer at SpaceX, told dot.LA. “Our website has been pretty barren.” Soule co-founded the company two years ago with fellow former SpaceX engineers John Howard and Ben Stabler. Including $3.6 million in seed funding, the startup has now raised more than $53 million to date.

Parallel Systems’ technology relies on replacing traditional diesel-powered locomotives with battery-powered freight cars. In its model, each train car is self-powered, and can break apart from or join together with other cars as needed. In theory, this ability to autonomously break apart and reassemble as needed would reduce the need for switching stations, where trains are reorganized and rerouted manually.

It could also drastically reduce the significant physical footprint of trains, converting them from two-mile-long behemoths into “platoons” of 20-to-50 cars that wouldn’t require massive terminals for loading and unloading. Smaller trains would be able to travel closer to their final destinations before being unloaded—reducing trucking emissions, which account for roughly 7% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., in the process.

“The opportunity we’ve been after is kind of decarbonizing freight from a new angle,” Soule said.

All of these ideas would be beneficial toward alleviating America’s clogged supply chains and reaching its ambitious carbon emission goals—if they were able to be integrated into America’s existing rail infrastructure. On that front, some experts are skeptical.

“My first instinct was that this looks like SpaceX engineers getting bored and working on something that they know nothing about,” Chris Caplice, executive director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Transportation & Logistics, told dot.LA. “They didn’t think about the larger system—whether it's regulatory, the network itself, the rail operations or the labor involved. I think they just found a technological solution to a problem they wanted to solve.”

From left: Parallel Systems co-founders Ben Stabler, Matt Soule and John Howard.Courtesy of Parallel Systems

Caplice worries that Parallel Systems’ technology fails to consider the realities of America’s existing rail network. Today, rail lines are divided into signal blocks, which can range from less than a mile to 15 miles long; these blocks are in fixed geographic positions, and only one train at a time is permitted into any signal block. For the new autonomous, single-car system to work, “you would have to put in thousands more control points in different places to get the network chopped down small enough to do this,” according to Dale Lewis, the former director of strategic analysis for CSX Transportation.

Even then, it likely still wouldn’t look like what Parallel Systems is imagining, with cars continuously breaking in and out of platoons. To realize what the company is pitching, Lewis says you’d need a complete revamp of the entire rail system.

“If [Parallel Systems] can bring in a couple people who have deep experience in operations planning…and sit with them for a day to go through how this would fit in the system, they’d probably come to some different conclusions about what they’ve got,” he said.

While the startup doesn’t employ any full-time railway operations specialists, Soule says Parallel Systems has brought in “veterans from the industry” who have helped them “understand the business.” He says safety is a top priority for the company; indeed, their vehicles would feature AI that would allow them to come to a stop quicker than traditional trains. No one is going to argue against safer trains—though most modern trains already come equipped with a system known as Positive Train Control, which autonomously prevents train-to-train collisions and other human errors.

Still, the 24-person firm is planning to hire heavily on the software side as it tries to figure out how to integrate its ambitious designs into the existing infrastructure. On the hardware side, Parallel Systems is working toward the second iteration of its prototype battery-electric rail vehicle, and testing it on a closed track in California.

“We’re going as fast as we can in terms of building the tech,” Soule said.

Parallel Systems Explainer VideoVideo via www.youtube.com

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“Millions of Dollars Completely Wasted”: Without Neuromarketing, Tech Firms’ Ads Get Lost in the Noise

Samson Amore

Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College and previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.

“Millions of Dollars Completely Wasted”: Without Neuromarketing, Tech Firms’ Ads Get Lost in the Noise

At Super Bowl LVII, advertisers paid at least $7 million for 30–second ad spots, and even more if they didn’t have a favorable relationship with Fox. But the pricey commercials didn’t persuade everyone.

A recent report from advertising agency Kern and neuroscience marketing research outfit SalesBrain is attempting to answer that question using facial recognition and eye-tracking software.

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https://twitter.com/samsonamore
samsonamore@dot.la

Behind Her Empire: ComplYant Founder and CEO Shiloh Johnson on Helping Small Businesses

Yasmin Nouri

Yasmin is the host of the "Behind Her Empire" podcast, focused on highlighting self-made women leaders and entrepreneurs and how they tackle their career, money, family and life.

Each episode covers their unique hero's journey and what it really takes to build an empire with key lessons learned along the way. The goal of the series is to empower you to see what's possible & inspire you to create financial freedom in your own life.

Behind Her Empire: ComplYant Founder and CEO Shiloh Johnson on Helping Small Businesses

On this episode of Behind Her Empire, ComplYant founder and CEO Shiloh Johnson discusses her journey to building a multimillion dollar business and making knowledge of taxes more accessible.


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Taylor Swift Concert in the Metaverse? Ticketing Platform Token Is Using NFTs To Optimize Experiences

Andria Moore

Andria is the Social and Engagement Editor for dot.LA. She previously covered internet trends and pop culture for BuzzFeed, and has written for Insider, The Washington Post and the Motion Picture Association. She obtained her bachelor's in journalism from Auburn University and an M.S. in digital audience strategy from Arizona State University. In her free time, Andria can be found roaming LA's incredible food scene or lounging at the beach.

Taylor Swift Concert in the Metaverse? Ticketing Platform Token Is Using NFTs To Optimize Experiences
Evan Xie

When Taylor Swift announced her ‘Eras’ tour back in November, all hell broke loose.

Hundreds of thousands of dedicated Swifties — many of whom were verified for the presale — were disappointed when Ticketmaster failed to secure them tickets, or even allow them to peruse ticketing options.

But the Taylor Swift fiasco is just one of the latest in a long line of complaints against the ticketing behemoth. Ticketmaster has dominated the event and concert space since its merger with Live Nation in 2010 with very few challengers — until now.

Adam Jones, founder and CEO of Token, a fan-first commerce platform for events, said he has the platform and the tech ready to take it on. With Token, Jones is creating a system where there are no queues. In other words, fans know immediately which events are sold out and where.

“We come in very fortunate to have a modern, scalable tech stack that's not going to have all these outages or things being down,” Jones said. “That's step one. The other thing is we’re being aggressively transparent about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. So with the Taylor Swift thing…you would know in real time if you actually have a chance of getting the tickets.”

Here’s how it works: Users register for Token’s app and then purchase tickets to either an in-person event, or an event in the metaverse through Animal Concerts. The purchased ticket automatically shows up in the form of a mintable NFT, which can then be used toward merchandise purchases, other ticketed events or, Adams’s hope for the future — external rewards like airline travel. The more active a user is on the site, the more valuable their NFT becomes.

Ticketmaster has dominated the music industry for so long because of its association with big name artists. To compete, Token is working on gaining access to their own slew of popular artists. They recently entered into a partnership with Animal Concerts, a live and non-live event experiences platform that houses artists like Alicia Keys, Snoop Dogg and Robin Thicke.

“You'll see they do all the metaverse side of the house,” Jones said. “And we're going to be the [real-life] web3 sides of the house.”

In addition, Token prides itself on working with the artists selling on their platform to set up the best system for their fanbase, devoid of hefty prices and additional fees — something Ticketmaster users have often complained about. Jones believes where Ticketmaster fails, Token thrives. The app incentivizes users to share more data about their interests, venues and artists by operating on a kind of points system in the form of mintable NFTs.

“We can actually take the dataset and say there’s 100 million people in the globe that love Taylor Swift, so imagine she’s going on tour and we ask [the user], ‘Would you go to see her in Detroit?’ And imagine this place has 30,000 seats, but 100,000 people clicked ‘yes,’” he explained. “So you can actually inform the user before anything even happens, right? About what their options are and where to get it.”

Tixr, a Santa-Monica based ticketing app, was founded on the idea that modern ticketing platforms were “living in the legacy of the past.” They plan to attract users by offering them exclusive access to ticketed events that aren’t in Ticketmaster’s registry.

“It melts commerce that's beyond ticketing…to allow fans to experience and purchase things that don't necessarily have to do with tickets,” said Tixr CEO and Founder Robert Davari. “So merchandise, and experiences, and hospitality and stuff like that are all elegantly melded into this one, content driven interface.”

Tixr sells tickets to exclusive concerts like a Tyga performance at a night club in Arizona, general in-person festivals like ComplexCon, and partners with local vendors like The Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach to sell tickets to the races. Plus, Davari said it’s equipped to handle high-demand, so customers aren’t spending hours waiting in digital queues.

Like Token, Tixr has also found success with a rewards program — in the form of fan marketing.

“There's nothing more powerful in the core of any event, brand, any live entertainment, [than] the community behind it,” Davari said. “So we build technology to empower those fans and to reward them for bringing their friends and spreading the word.”

Basically, if a user gets a friend to purchase tickets to an event, then the original user gets rewarded in the form of discounts or upgrades.

Coupled with their platforms’ ability to handle high-demand events, both Jones and Davari believe their platforms have what it takes to take on Ticketmaster. Expansion into the metaverse, they think, will also help even the playing field.

“So imagine you can't go to Taylor Swift,” Jones said. “What if you could purchase an exclusive to actually go to that exact same show over the metaverse? An artist’s whole world can expand past the stage itself.”

With the way ticketing for events works now, obviously not everyone always gets the exact price, venue or date they want. There are “winners and losers.” Jones’s hope is that by expanding beyond in-person events, there can be more winners.

“If there’s 100,000 people who want to go to one show and there's 37,000 seats, 70,000 are out,” he said. “You can't fight that. But what we can do is start to give them other opportunities to do things in a different way and actually still participate.”

Jones and Davari both teased that their platforms have some exciting developments in the works, but for now both Token and Tixr are set on making their own space within the industry.

“We simply want to advance this industry and make it more efficient and more pleasurable for fans to buy,” Davari said. “That's it.”

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