# Update and New Offering | Swift Rails, Inc.

- Canonical URL: https://wefunder.com/feed/153917
- Entity ID: wefunder:feed_item:153917
- Published at: 2022-03-24 19:22:12 UTC
- Updated at: 2025-07-10 09:36:53 UTC

## Author
Daryl Anderson

## Subject
Swift Rails, Inc.

## Content
Dear Investors & Supporters,We wanted to take this opportunity to give you some highlights of 2021 and let you know where we are headed.&nbsp; COVID has been historically difficult in many ways, yet as a business, we are making surprisingly good progress. Since in person marketing and networking have been tough to do, we largely turned our focus inward during 2021 to successfully focus on further developing our technology.&nbsp; And despite the challenges, we achieved significant traction on the business development front too.&nbsp; I am happy to report that things are going very well!We have made considerable progress in several key areas – remote control of vehicles, wheel truck and chassis design, vehicle position tracking and monitoring, track fabrication and the design for scalability of systems. These are largely unseen changes that improve our company significantly. They may lead to patents, better service, and lower costs of production as we scale operations.We constructed an indoor and outdoor test track in 2021, which has helped us advance our technologies to the next level.&nbsp; Visually there is not much difference in the vehicle but the series of “tweaks” we have made to the design are a big deal.&nbsp; Swift Rails now performs better – it corners better, is more reliable and easier to maintain.&nbsp; In addition, we have made improvements in the design and process that allow us to manufacture faster and at lower cost at both full scale and, maybe even more importantly, at small to intermediate scale.We have made incredible progress in advancing innovation in our product during the pandemic.&nbsp; COVID has been terrible in so many ways.&nbsp; It disrupted everyone’s lives.&nbsp; It disrupted our plans significantly.&nbsp;Surprisingly, it did not slow down our progress.&nbsp; In fact, it may have been an accelerator to our innovation as we focused almost entirely on how to make a better, more scalable product.&nbsp; It may be the quality of our team rather than this internal focus, or maybe the combination of the two – but it has been significant.&nbsp; Close to every month we are coming up with a new improvement or innovation.&nbsp; Sometimes it is a process improvement that might reduce cost by a factor of 3 or 4.&nbsp; Sometimes it is an improvement to reliability that will reduce the cost of operations.&nbsp; Sometimes it is reducing 12 parts to 4 with a better design.&nbsp; These innovations keep coming and they are additive and sometimes even multiplicative.&nbsp; So, despite a pandemic, inflation, and some crazy rising prices – our systems are becoming faster to produce and at lower costs.&nbsp; So here is an analogy of sorts that may help explain how our production is different than you might expect using some approximate numbers from the car industry.&nbsp; Cars are very capital intensive.&nbsp; A large car company may have tens of billions of dollars in invested capital in factories to produce cars and trucks.&nbsp; They spend $1 to $2 billion on coming up with a new concept car to bring to market.&nbsp; The way the largest car companies are structured, with all the invested capital and legacy costs, they may need to sell millions of cars each year just to break even.&nbsp; How can Swift Rails possibly compete on a dollar-for-dollar basis with these enormous companies?Thankfully we don’t have to.&nbsp; First, we already have our concept vehicle (and track).&nbsp; Based on survey and one on one discussions, we guess that around 90% of people that have seen our concept vehicle like it,… and we built it for way less than a billion dollars!&nbsp; A small highly intelligent, knowledgeable, creative and well-functioning team can do a lot.&nbsp; This is the nature of big innovation.We designed a system that is relatively simple – one that we could build by hand as well as with robots.&nbsp; We did this because we already knew how to do it and also because we didn’t have a few billion dollars to build a factory.&nbsp; Like the auto industry, we use a number of great suppliers, although I sense that we might be better at engaging them creatively.&nbsp; So, we have developed a means of small-scale production that we can relatively easily increase to intermediate scale with the addition of people and robots.&nbsp; This is really cool.&nbsp; As we move globally, intermediate scale production allows us to be more local and improve our ability to deliver great transportation. I wanted to share some more with you about our business model.&nbsp; Swift Rails has this great new concept that can change transit, but how does the company and our investors benefit?&nbsp; The best part of capitalism is that something new that has great benefit can be very quickly adopted.&nbsp; In an ideal sense everyone should benefit from the innovation.&nbsp; In this case that means – customers, cities, investors, employees, and the Earth.&nbsp; When all of these are lined up everyone benefits – riders get a great experience; cities become better; investors make money; employees lead fulfilling careers; and civilization advances.&nbsp; We think that Swift Rails can achieve all these things which excites us every day.&nbsp; Since this is a letter to investors, I’ll put some focus on how the company and our investors benefit.As discussed above, we figured out, with small to intermediate scale production, how to avoid big capital costs which reduce investor return.&nbsp;Although we provide transportation, we are less like a car company and more like a tech company from a business model perspective.&nbsp; We make money primarily in two ways, the one-time construction of systems and their recurring operations.&nbsp; Systems are all custom but built from standard components.&nbsp; This is probably worth explaining.&nbsp; Each city, each installation, has its own unique geometry.&nbsp; We design a system that is going to work well for them.&nbsp; The track is all the same in that it has the same gauge and is fabricated in the shop and installed in the field.&nbsp; It is custom in that the lengths, curves, and support column heights are all designed specifically for the locations where they are going.&nbsp; The vehicles all have the same powertrain and essentially the same frame design.&nbsp;Operationally, all systems have the same physics and the same controls.There are a number of built-in advantages to this model.&nbsp; While our projects are large – they are inexpensive and much faster to build compared to the alternatives.&nbsp; A $50 million-dollar Swift Rails system replaces a billion dollar plus conventional transit system.&nbsp; And we can build the system in months rather than years.&nbsp; The custom, built to order systems with standard components we provide are instead of other custom systems.&nbsp;We are faster to deliver.&nbsp; We don’t have to keep big inventory and can produce without big factory capital expenses.&nbsp; Since we use standard components and customize from there our costs decline as we increase scale.We also make recurring revenue from operation of systems.&nbsp; Operations is a combination of people and software to run the systems.&nbsp; Two things are going on as we scale.&nbsp; Operations are very similar across systems so that there is almost no incremental cost increase on the software side and there are some best practice efficiencies that we get with personnel.&nbsp; As we move forward in time, the software that we use to run the systems will continue to evolve and improve operations and lower costs together with scale making the recurring operational revenue more profitable.&nbsp; As we scale, our product becomes more compelling, and investor returns increase.While the pandemic kept us from being out meeting people in the market, we’re starting to have more interaction and business prospects and general interest is increasing. Since we closed our first offering, we have had a number of people ask how they can invest.&nbsp; We are doing a second, limited offering of shares at $9 on Wefunder, up from $5.81 in the first round.&nbsp; If you choose to increase your position or let others know about Swift Rails, your help is appreciated.&nbsp; The campaign is currently open to friends (https://wefunder.com/swiftrails), which we consider you one, and will open to the public on March 30.&nbsp; The current environment is far better than what it was when we launched our campaign in 2020 when great uncertainty about the pandemic and economy was pervasive. To those that invested in us back then, your confidence made possible the meaningful advances that have us so well positioned today.As we begin to let the world know about Swift Rails, any help or involvement from our investors and supporters is sincerely appreciated. Again, thanks so much!We are excited about the great things that lie ahead for Swift Rails.Sincerely,Kevin&nbsp;__________________Kevin Neumaier, P.E.CEOSwift Rails, Inc.