Forterra

Alberto Lacaze started Robotic Research in Maryland in 2002, and for two decades the company sold autonomy kits to Army labs while most of the driverless industry chased highways and taxis. The rebrand to Forterra landed in February 2024, retiring the Robotic Research Autonomous Industries name and the on-highway ambitions along with it. Clarksburg, Maryland is still home. What followed was a fast climb. A $238 million Series C in 2025 led by Moore Strategic Ventures pushed the reported valuation past a billion dollars, headcount went beyond 450, and Josh Araujo took over as chief executive with Lacaze moving to chairman and president. The company now organises itself around four pillars, mobility, communications, sensing and compute, rather than around a single autonomy stack.

Mobility remains the core. AutoDrive fuses lidar, radar, cameras and inertial navigation to drive vehicles off road in GPS denied terrain, handling convoy following, obstacle avoidance and platooning without a satellite fix. It is the software inside the Marine Corps ROGUE Fires Joint Light Tactical Vehicles, delivered with Oshkosh Defense and billed by Forterra as the Defense Department's first production contract for ground vehicle autonomy. BAE Systems fitted it to an autonomous Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle prototype in 2025. The Army picked Forterra for Phase II of its Ground Vehicle Autonomy Pathways work feeding the Robotic Combat Vehicle, for an engineer autonomous breaching effort, and for last tactical mile logistics experiments. With Polaris the company showed MESA in 2026, a driverless Ranger XD 1500 carrying 2,000 pounds of interchangeable payload for casualty evacuation. The first American autonomous ground vehicles fielded in Ukraine came out of the same stack.

The rest of the portfolio filled in through 2025. TerraLink is the command and control layer, a modular vehicle management platform that keeps operators and machines on one live picture when bandwidth collapses. Vektor sits underneath it as a software defined transport layer for disrupted, degraded, intermittent and low bandwidth conditions, brokering data across whatever tactical waveform is available. Vertex works the electromagnetic spectrum, detecting, classifying and geolocating emitters and ranking each detection against the wider threat picture. Edge Compute supplies the rugged processing all of it runs on. In October 2025 Forterra bought goTenna outright and kept the mesh networking company intact as a business line under founder chief executive Ari Schuler. The Pro X2 handheld and vehicle mounted Pro X2m run the Aspen Grove protocol, pushing position reports, text, voice notes and sensor data in short low power bursts that are hard to pick out of the noise.

Commercial work runs alongside the defense business, aimed at closed property rather than public roads. The flagship there is the Kalmar Ottawa AutoTT, an autonomous terminal tractor built on AutoDrive with Finnish cargo handling maker Kalmar, testing at North American distribution centres ahead of commercial availability in 2027. Yard trucks, class 8 vehicles, shuttles and agricultural machinery sit in the same line.