Forterra's Horizontal Autonomy Strategy
Scott Sanders, chief growth officer at Forterra, on the defense tech startup playbook
A horizontal autonomy company is really making a bet that the hard part is not one vehicle, it is the reusable autonomy core underneath many vehicles. Forterra is saying its advantage comes from one tightly coupled hardware and software kit that can be mounted on a yard truck, a military launcher, or another ground vehicle in about 60 days, which turns defense into the funding wedge and commercial logistics into upside later. Vertical players like Outrider and Kodiak usually get to cleaner product market fit faster because they solve one workflow end to end.
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The vertical model wins by narrowing the problem. Outrider focuses on trailer yards, where the robot moves trailers around fenced logistics sites, and Kodiak focuses on long haul trucking. That lets them optimize safety cases, customer workflows, and sales motion around one buyer and one operating environment.
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The horizontal model wins by reusing the same autonomy stack across adjacent platforms. Forterra describes one core product sold into both defense and commercial vehicles, while Shield AI is pushing Hivemind from small drones into helicopters, jets, and other OEM platforms. That can spread R&D over more revenue streams and reduce dependence on one market cycle.
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The trade off is execution complexity. A vertical company can look like a product company sooner, but if freight or yard budgets freeze, growth stalls with the market. A horizontal company has more shots on goal, but it has to design a stack generic enough to port across platforms without becoming a custom services business.
The likely direction is a split market. The best vertical companies will own high value operating niches where the workflow stays narrow and repeatable. The best horizontal companies will become autonomy suppliers of record, with defense as the first large buyer because it pays for rugged, multi platform systems before commercial markets are fully ready.