Defense First Autonomy Playbook
Scott Sanders, chief growth officer at Forterra, on the defense tech startup playbook
The key point is that Forterra is using defense to finance and harden an autonomy stack before commercial trucking is ready to buy driver out systems at scale. In practice, middle mile means long haul and fleet routes where a truck owner must trust software with public road safety, labor rules, insurance, and regulators. That buying motion is still slow, while defense and yard operations already have urgent demand for removing people from dangerous or repetitive vehicle tasks.
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Forterra is not waiting for on road trucking to mature. It built one core autonomy kit that can go on military vehicles, yard trucks, and other off road platforms, then sells into markets that can buy now. That lowers product risk and lets one hardware and software stack improve across multiple deployments.
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The commercial market that closes first is not highway freight, it is controlled sites like terminal yards. Those sites have concentrated fleets, expensive labor, weak GPS, and repetitive routes, so autonomy saves money sooner and can be supervised more easily than trucks spread across public roads.
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This is the same broader defense startup playbook that Anduril helped prove out. Build a product with private capital, sell it as a repeatable system instead of custom research, and use an urgent government need to reach scale. Forterra followed that path by winding down legacy services work and focusing on a product business.
Over the next few years, the autonomy market is likely to expand outward from defense and yards, then into depots, drayage, and only later true driver out road freight. The companies that win will be the ones that use these serviceable markets to lower cost, prove safety, and build production scale before the larger trucking market is ready.