For years, people in Norfolk complained about the same thing.
Trains.
Blocked crossings. Missed appointments. Late pickups. Entire parts of the city cut off without warning. It was constant, and it was frustrating, but it was also accepted.
That’s what stood out to Andria McClellan.
“Those were the issues that I regularly heard about… people complaining about the trains blocking their access.”
At the time, she was serving on Norfolk City Council. The complaints weren’t new, and they weren’t unique. But when she started looking deeper, she realized something far more surprising than the problem itself.
“There’s no data. You don’t have any data on how many times the train has blocked your road.”
In a world where nearly everything is tracked, measured, and optimized, one of the most visible disruptions to daily life had no real system behind it. No consistent tracking. No usable dataset. No accountability.
That gap became the opportunity.
But Oculus Rail didn’t come from a straight line.
Long before stepping back into the startup world, McClellan had already lived through its extremes. Early success, real momentum, and then collapse.
“I thought I was gonna become a dot com billionaire. I became a dot bomb instead.”
She had raised capital, built teams, and eventually shut a company down, laying people off and filing for bankruptcy. It was the kind of experience that either pulls people out of entrepreneurship entirely or hardens them for what comes next.
“I’ve been through the ringer.”
What followed wasn’t a return to startups. It was a shift into public service, then politics. She ran for office, built a campaign from the ground up, and won. Then she ran again. And lost.
“I got shellacked in that primary. I mean, I don’t sugarcoat it.”
Loss, for her, wasn’t abstract. It was public. It was definitive. And it was frequent enough to force a decision about what came next.
“I think of myself as a problem solver… you have to have a passion about trying to come up with a solution where you’re seeing a pain point.”
The train problem never left. If anything, her time in government gave her a clearer view of how broken the system really was. Railroads knew where their trains were, but that information didn’t translate to the people being impacted.
“They don’t correlate that to our roads.”
Communities were frustrated. Governments had no usable data. And the rail industry, despite its scale, wasn’t structured to solve for either.
So she decided to build something that would.
“It’s a lens through which you see something.”
The concept is straightforward. Sensors placed near crossings use computer vision to detect when a train is present, how long it stays, and how often disruptions occur. The result is something that has never really existed in a usable way before, a clear, consistent dataset around blocked crossings.
“We’re not selling a sensor. We’re selling data.”
That distinction matters. The product isn’t hardware. It’s visibility. It’s the ability for cities, departments of transportation, and eventually mapping systems to understand and respond to a problem that has always been treated as unavoidable.
But building the technology was only one part of the challenge.
“The most difficult thing is managing people… I’m empathetic. I want everybody to be happy.”
Leadership, especially in early-stage companies, rarely looks like the highlight reel. It’s hiring, mistakes, missed expectations, and constant recalibration. For McClellan, the challenge isn’t understanding what needs to be done. It’s balancing execution with the human side of building a team.
That tension hasn’t gone away. It’s something she’s still working through as the company grows.
At the same time, the real friction isn’t internal. It’s external.
Selling into government.
“It’s hard. It takes a long time.”
Procurement cycles stretch. Decisions involve layers of stakeholders. Budgets move slowly. Even for someone who has sat on the inside of that system, it’s a grind.
But that friction also creates protection.
“It’s my moat.”
The same complexity that slows adoption makes it difficult for competitors to move quickly. And for a company built around infrastructure and data, that matters.
Because the long-term vision extends well beyond a single app or dashboard.
The data Oculus Rail is collecting has the potential to integrate into navigation platforms, emergency response systems, and city planning tools. It can influence how roads are designed, how grants are awarded, and how transportation decisions are made.
But none of that happens without the first step, proving the problem in a way that can’t be ignored.
And that’s where McClellan has focused.
“We’re not trying to stop a train. We’re just trying to make sure people don’t get stopped by trains.”
It’s a simple statement, but it reframes the entire issue. The trains aren’t the problem. The lack of visibility is.
Most people experience that frustration and move on.
She didn’t.
She turned it into a company.
