Well, the defense tech money hose isn’t looking like it’s slowing down anytime soon.
On Wednesday, ground autonomy company Forterra announced a massive $238M Series C that launched its valuation over the $1B mark. The funding round—which included $50M in debt financing—was led by Moore Strategic Ventures with participation from RTX Ventures, Franklin Templeton, Hanwha Asset Management, and a whole bunch more.
Solo drive: Forterra, for the unacquainted, was founded way, way back in 2002 as Robotic Research Autonomous Industries and rebranded to Forterra in early 2024. It’s made a name for itself by building autonomous systems for vehicles—particularly those operating in the complex, off-road environments you’d find on a battlefield.
Speedrunning: We’ve written a lot about Forterra in the past month, but here’s a quick recap of what they’ve been cooking up:
- Their flagship product is vehicle autonomy software called AutoDrive, which they bill as a “full stack solution,” including hardware, software, and sensing.
- They’ve integrated AutoDrive on a whole range of vehicles from big-time producers, including Polaris, General Dynamics, Mack, and Rheinmetall.
- Last month, they partnered with BAE to prototype AutoDrive on its Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle (AMPV)—an Army program worth up to $2.28B—and followed that up by unveiling a prototype of the DeepFires autonomous launcher built with RTX and Oshkosh at AUSA.
- They also fully acquired networking and secure comms company goTenna in October because, as CEO Josh Araujo told Tectonic, “self-driving can work great, but if you don’t have comms, you’ve got a brick sitting out there.”
They’re also on a $114M US Army contract delivering autonomous breaching systems.
Needless to say, moving at that breakneck pace caught the eyes of a few new friends in high places, who pulled up a seat at the cap table alongside some of Forterra’s old (in defense tech terms) pals:
- New investors included Salesforce Ventures, Franklin Templeton, Balyasny Asset Management, 645 Ventures, Hanwha Asset Management, 9Yards Capital, RTX Ventures, and NightDragon.
- Existing investors doubling down on Forterra included XYZ Venture Capital, Hedosophia, Enlightenment Capital, and Crescent Cove, which provided both equity and debt and has been in the Forterra family since their Series A in 2021.
“Given how much revenue we do, we’re making sure that we have the proper headcount, engineering, and operations to deliver those products to customers and expand into new product lines as well,” Scott Sanders, Forterra’s Chief Growth Officer, told Tectonic on the sidelines of our European Defense Summit in Paris.
Better together: In keeping with the prime-startup partnership team-up trend du jour, Sanders said that RTX joining the squad as a partner (and now equity investor) is all about speed and delivering the finished products the Pentagon likes to buy.
“Being able to partner with these large OEMs is a super important part of our business case, and when they can come in as capital investors, that helps align those business cases together,” he said.
“Even the 100,000-person-plus defense primes can’t build every product that a customer needs,” Sanders added. “We’re not going to pretend to be able to pretend to be able to do everything that our customers can need [either], so we think that delivering end-to-end mission systems with those partners is the best thing for the warfighter.”
Adding Hanwha—which also recently invested in Firehawk—to the team could also lead to some fancy new autonomous tech. And a relationship like Forterra’s with RTX on the DeepFires program is the “ideal end-state.”
“We’re still pretty early days with Hanwha, but as they stand up their US team, we’ve been chatting about what we can do together and how we can enable each other to deploy more capabilities to the customers,” Sanders said.
As if all that wasn’t enough, he added that we should gear up for some “new contracts in the next few months.” Sounds like Forterra’s heading for the big leagues on autopilot.