Fortera is in the business of self-driving vehicles.

The startup has developed capabilities for defense and industrial customers, including a recently announced production contract with the U.S. Marines to help make Oshkosh's rogue fires vehicle autonomous.

CEO Josh Arajo says Forteara has a two-fold mission, taking soldiers and Marines out of harm's way and making them more lethal and effective on the battlefield.

We do this in a couple different ways, mainly by integrating hardware, software, compute, sensors to enable those Marines and soldiers to do remote missions from more protected locations

and control more than one vehicle or one system from a remote location. And the core to how

we do that is through our self-driving software. So this is software that we've battle tested. It's been

deployed in Afghanistan. We've really done this in a lot of different environments and context.

And it's currently fielded with Marines today and soldiers and in production on several programs.

As defense budgets face pressure, companies like Forteara are focused on helping the military do

more with less. Having a dual-use technology that can be used by both commercial customers and the government

helps enable that.

The tech itself could also mean fewer humans ultimately needed.

Chief Growth Officer Scott Sanders gives the example of a test mission that was recently conducted.

A mission that normally would have taken four or five people to complete was done with one.

They were able to deploy several vehicles with either zero or one people tasking them.

And when you start to expand that scale, when you think about robotic fires platforms,

if you want to mass fires and you need humans to do it, you need to scale a lot of humans with those missiles and

those sensors. And the minute you can go and have one person do that and task 10 or 15 platforms,

you no longer need to have a military to match man for man our competitors, which we just can't do.

And so really changes our ability to project power at a lower cost

and take people out of those positions where they are naturally going to be targets in the battlefield.

Fortera is partnering with defense prime contractors and working directly with the military.

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