In 2006, Matt Soule joined Space Exploration Technologies Corp. just as the company was recovering from an unsuccessful flight launch. For the next 13 years, Soule had a hand in every single program the company developed, including Starlink.
“I started really thinking a lot about SpaceX’s mission to make life multi-planetary and thinking, you know what, I actually like living here on Earth. So what am I doing personally to make sure that we have a lower likelihood of going to need that insurance policy?” Soule said. “So I started thinking a lot about the intersection of technology and transportation and to an extent climate.”
That was the genesis behind Soule founding Parallel Systems, an autonomous freight rail company based in downtown Los Angeles, in 2020. The company, much like SpaceX, is targeting an overlooked sector dominated by legacy players that is historically difficult for Silicon Valley to penetrate: U.S. railroads.
Parallel Systems announced in early October that it raised $100 million in series C funding. The round was led by Advance Venture Partners, with additional funding from a handful of local inventors like Santa Monica-based Anthos Capital and Cobalt Capital, as well as Venice-based Riot Ventures.
“Here is this legacy mode rail, the original technology bubble, that was really under-participating in the surface freight market. It’s a very energy efficient infrastructure. It’s capable of carrying lots of weight,” Soule said. “But because of the history of it, it operates at a very big scale. You really miss out on serving a greater part of the market by operating at such a massive scale.”
Boosting rail in goods movement
Despite the railway cementing its place in the American cultural lexicon as a symbol of industrialism, it makes up a small slice of the plethora of freight tools that push goods from the U.S. to Mexico and Canada. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, trucks made up 63% of transborder freight utilization in 2025. Comparatively, rail made up only 11%.
That makes sense – trucks can go to more places, whereas railways require additional transportation to deliver crates of chips to the gas station. And due to revenue thresholds and the high cost of maintenance, the railroad industry has slowly over time left shorter routes vacant, leaving once-active miles of track untouched for decades.
“The mission became, let’s not build a better train, let us equip the industry with the tools to go catch more market share,” Soule said.
Parallel System’s Panther vehicle is equipped to push cargo across rail lines for 500 miles sans an operator. The vehicles are also battery-powered, eschewing the fluctuating cost of diesel prices.
Though logistics has become an obsession of Silicon Valley ever since 2020, when the pandemic highlighted inefficient supply chain issues, rail remained relatively overlooked by investors. In 2025, the global transportation and logistics sector received a record high of $266 billion in capital, the majority of which went to logistics software.
But, Soule said, reviving railways could help the U.S. logistics ecosystem manage long-held pain points the sector has resigned itself to. If more goods could be moved from Los Angeles’ two ports to rail, perhaps there would be fewer trucks contributing to traffic on the 710 Freeway.
“The entire Parallel team have built a proven, viable and scalable autonomous freight rail platform that has generated significant commercial interest among the major rail companies in the U.S. and globally,” Arun Gupta, Parallel Systems executive chair and adviser at Anthos Capital, said in a statement.
