Gemma Allen of theCUBE engages with Josh Araujo, Chief Executive Officer of Forterra, during theCUBE and NYSE Wired's Physical AI & Robotics Series. This session takes place at the New York Stock Exchange, where industry leaders converge to discuss cutting-edge advancements in technology and finance.
In this video, Araujo provides insights into Forterra's evolution, highlighting their recent Series C funding and the company’s focus on military applications of AI and autonomy. Araujo shares their journey from the Marine Corps to Wall Street, emphasizing the importance of mission-critical technologies for the defense sector. This session, part of theCUBE Research, is hosted by Allen.
Key insights include Forterra’s strategic collaborations with giants such as Raytheon and Volvo, the challenges in deploying autonomous systems in environments lacking GPS, and AI's significant role in defense technology. Araujo notes Forterra's commitment to innovation and integrity, ensuring they remain at the forefront of developing transformative military technologies. Enhance your understanding of AI's role in defense through the experiences shared by the guest and the analysts.
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Josh Araujo, Forterra
Metabob revolutionizes AI code analysis and optimization through innovative applications of cutting-edge technology. In this insightful session, Dave Vellante of SiliconANGLE Media hosts Axel Lönnfors, chief operating officer at Metabob, at the Rosewood for theCUBE + NYSE Wired event. Lönnfors discusses advancements in AI code analysis, providing a glimpse into Metabob's use of graph neural networks to streamline code optimization and refactor substantial legacy systems.
The Metabob platform leverages AI by integrating graph neural networks with large language models, effectively modernizing and detecting anomalies within extensive codebases. Co-hosted by theCUBE Research, the discussion explores how Metabob’s capabilities assist companies, ranging from government agencies to Fortune 500 firms, in managing their technical debt. Lönnfors details the enterprise-driven approach and the journey towards achieving product-market fit.
Key insights from the conversation include the importance of accurate anomaly detection and automated fixes for maintaining operational efficiency. Lönnfors emphasizes Metabob’s unique position, highlighting its focus on preserving code context to prevent issues such as 502 errors. They assert that customer satisfaction and value delivery remain the company's guiding principles, steering Metabob towards greater integration into AI-driven development environments.
Gemma Allen of theCUBE engages with Josh Araujo, Chief Executive Officer of Forterra, during theCUBE and NYSE Wired's Physical AI & Robotics Series. This session takes place at the New York Stock Exchange, where industry leaders converge to discuss cutting-edge advancements in technology and finance.
In this video, Araujo provides insights into Forterra's evolution, highlighting their recent Series C funding and the company’s focus on military applications of AI and autonomy. Araujo shares their journey from the Marine Corps to Wall Street, emphasizi...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
What can you tell me about Forterra and its recent activities, including the Series C funding and the company's history?add
What has been the timeline and focus of the company's development and mission?add
What experiences contributed to the speaker's transition from the Marine Corps to working with businesses on Wall Street, and how did those experiences shape their role at Forterra?add
What career path did the individual take before working at Forterra, and what is their focus in their current role?add
What developments and milestones have occurred in the field of autonomy and robotics over the past 20 years, particularly in relation to military applications?add
What has been the journey and impact of a company founded by Alberto Lacaze in 2002 related to autonomy and robotics in military applications?add
What recent partnerships has the company established in the defense technology space, and how do they view their role in the broader ecosystem?add
What has been the impact of recent partnerships on the approach to defense technology and the evolving missions faced by the military?add
>> I'm Gemma Allen with theCUBE. This is our physical AI series. We're here at our studio in the New York Stock Exchange connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. And today we're connecting Maryland to Wall Street. Joining me in studio, I have Josh Araujo, CEO of Forterra. Welcome, Josh.
Josh Araujo
>> Hi, it's a pleasure to be with you.
Gemma Allen
>> Thank you so much. So you guys have had a bit of news of late, raise a Series C. Described yourself as the 20-year startup. Unpack that for me. Tell me a little bit about the company and the journey you've been on.
Josh Araujo
>> So I'd like to say we're a overnight success 20 years in the making. Been around for 20 years, really focused on what is really in vogue today, which is this physical AI, AI and autonomy, really focused on military applications. The company since its founding and inception has been focused on serving the war fighter and getting critical technologies deployed. And we're definitely taking advantage of the increased interest. And closing the Series C is just another step in that journey for us.
Gemma Allen
>> Well, congratulations. And you're no stranger to Wall Street, at least the world of finance. Tell me a little bit about your own journey and your own leadership path.
Josh Araujo
>> No, after spending about 10 years in the Marine Corps, ended up in Wall Street. I didn't quite know what to expect, but had the real opportunity to advise and work with hundreds of companies and seeing really from the inside out what makes them tick, what makes them successful, what makes them differentiated. And then really bringing that experience to Forterra as we kind of move from really an applied research company into a scalable product company. Really it's focused on building the world-class teams and leaders. The best and brightest minds we can find, bringing them in together, aligning them against a common mission and a common purpose. Which for us, it's actually pretty easy. We can say, "Hey, look, we serve the war fighter. We focus on developing and deploying at scale mission-critical technologies." Turns out there's a lot of people that get passionate about that. So it's finding those right kind of people that want to get in, get their hands dirty, get out in the field with the war fighter, and develop really life changing, mission-critical technologies and getting them deployed at scale.
Gemma Allen
>> And tell me a little bit about the original vision for Forterra, right? When you guys were basically a company set up around like DARPA. It's been quite a journey. 20 years ago, a lot of us knew very little about the technology that we use now in our everyday lives.
Josh Araujo
>> I'm fortunate enough to work with a really awesome founder, Alberto Lacaze. So he founded the company in 2002 with his vision that autonomy and robotics could transform the way wars are fought, protect the war fighter, and founded the company on that premise about 23 years ago. Really a visionary man ahead of his time. And for the last 20 years, we've been focused on building and really attracting the world-class engineering talent, building and fielding mission-relevant products, everything from mine clearing vehicles in Afghanistan in 2009 to today. We've deployed several hundred vehicles into combat and operational environments, but really building that culture from the outset of mission focused, customer focused. And if you think about our customer, it's really that probably 18 to 25 year old soldier, Marine, they're doing a really hard job. They're in a really, really dangerous situation. And how do we deliver relevant technology to them as fast and as quickly and as effectively as possible? And so really, you started the company with that foundation. And then over time it built it into this really deep technology company focused in what is now a very hot area. So it's kind of an intersection of real passion for the product and the mission and then an intersection of market interest, for better or for worse, demand for these types of technologies. And that's where we're at today.
Gemma Allen
>> And I guess in that space, you guys have been on somewhat of a rebrand, right? You now have partnerships with Raytheon and AutoTT and Volvo. Talk to us a little bit about how you think about that, how you think about the broader ecosystem around defense tech, and how you guys really play in the space.
Josh Araujo
>> So really if you think about defense tech and defense, you think about how our military fights. It's a team of teams, air, ground task forces, joint coalitions. It's the same on the technology front. So we think about ourselves as the really helping bring the best of breed capabilities, vehicle platform, mission autonomy, self-driving systems, payloads, mission systems, and bringing those to bear in a very well integrated system, deployed forward with the war fighter to enable a very particular mission. And if you think about the missions that they face, they are ever evolving and ever-changing, almost on a daily and weekly basis. And so you have to have a coalition and a team of technology providers that are adapting that technology in real time, at the point of need, at the pace that is relevant to the war fighter. So these technologies with major defense crimes, we look at them as vital partners and components of the defense tech ecosystem. They do things that most traditional startups and technology software enabled businesses don't necessarily focus on. They're great at building things at scale, things that go boom at scale, big vehicles, lots of mechanical systems. We work with them to pair them with the things that are right on top of those vehicles, sensors, weapon systems, payloads, and really make those together into a mission system that works for that, again, 18 to 25 year old that has a tough job to do. We want to be that first call when the system needs to adapt or needs to change, we're going to be on call and on standby 24 hours a day to make sure that system's up and running.
Gemma Allen
>> And at the heart of your tech is this auto drive autonomy system, right? That's the brains of these vehicles and these drones that are used in battlefields. For the laymen amongst us, including myself, how do these systems... What are the kind of core tech differentiators for systems like Tesla or other kind of more mass utility autonomous vehicle systems?
Josh Araujo
>> That's right. And self-driving has been really in development and different forms of experimentation and prototype for the last really 30 years, believe it or not. And if you're looking at different challenges, driving on a road, driving off-road, driving in a convoy, driving with multiple vehicles having to coordinate maneuvers. If you're dealing with a Tesla or Waymo, you really have a... Although it's a unbounded public roads, city street, lots can happen. The environment in which you're operating is generally fixed. In a military environment, you have to deal with all those same challenges, but then maybe hang a sharp right turn and drive cross country. So the breadth and depth of challenges and technologies and approaches that you need to use to do that, not just reliably, but do it effectively in all weather environments, highly resilient is a much different problem. So it's a problem that we've been working on for a long time and we've now field it at scale and really seeing this make a difference for the men and women that are serving our country is a good feeling.
Gemma Allen
>> When I was reading about this, one thing that I guess was contextualizing for myself that I didn't think about is a lot of these are completely GPS denied environments, right? They're black holes, if you like. And I'm sure there's technology that you have to build and develop to continue to progress in those environments must be changing all the time, especially right now with AI and the kind of integration of AI into all tech models. Talk to me a little bit about that. Has that been very opportunistic for you?
Josh Araujo
>> It's been a real differentiator. So we deployed little over a hundred systems into a combat environment. Day one of user training with the customer as they're accepting the vehicles and starting to get familiarization with them. The first thing it did was brought a GPS and communications jammer and not just pointed it at the vehicle, but stuck it inside the vehicle and then sent the vehicle on a mission to see how it would react and operate. And of course it went fine, but that's really how you have to design these systems is for extreme weather, extreme comms denied, GPS denied, the most austere and extreme environments. And they have to work because the second they don't work, they're going to go sit in a parking lot, they're going to go sit on the shelf somewhere. So it's really something, and if you look at the culture and the people that we've hired in the company, these are all former special operators and Marines and soldiers that have dealt with technologies from years past. And the second you don't feel confident in putting your life in the hands of this technology, you're just not going to take it on patrol with you or on the operation. So it's really critical that these things, that they know there's somebody behind that product that's standing behind it that's ready to react and ready to adapt that product, and that it's going to work as intended and as promised.
Gemma Allen
>> And one thing I thought too was really interesting was you said it's not just about self-driving trucks or self-driving drones, right? It's about making operations anonymous. And I imagine that the level of security and in the world in which these machines are operating in must be phenomenally intense and complex. Talk to me a little bit about that and how that's changed in the last number of years.
Josh Araujo
>> I mean, self-driving and we're all familiar with FSD for Teslas and Waymos and the on road driving, in those cases, going from point A to point B is the so what? That is what you're trying to do effectively, safely, reliably, is go from point A to point B in a safe manner. In a military environment, that's just the means to an end. The in state is delivering supplies, delivering a payload, delivering a sensor, transporting some kind of mission system to an objective. And so it's really tying in vehicle, payload, autonomy, command, and control, all into one comprehensive system that achieves not just a, "Hey, this thing went from point A to point B and you got a really cool self-driving car driving around the battlefield." It's you are enabling that human, that Marine, or soldier to accomplish that mission more safely and securely from ideally a remote location. Bunkered in with the screen, sending a robot out to do something that would otherwise be them and that vehicle doing that dangerous mission. But that's a complex integration of multiple technologies from multiple vendors and multiple providers. And so it requires a different approach. We need to be humble with our partners or collaboratively with them to determine what is it the customer needs and then proactively integrate these capabilities together into a system and then get those four deployed in a very fast manner. Doing one-off prototypes just doesn't cut it. There's been decades and decades of single prototypes and, "Hey, look, I have a self-driving vehicle," or "Hey, I have this." It is really, "Can you do the thing and can you do it at scale?" And if you can't, the pace of things are moving so fast that it's just not going to be relevant.
Gemma Allen
>> And I guess if defense is one thing, it's a team game, right? And these are team interoperability machines. So we're all talking about agents right now. We're talking about this world of agent infrastructure and architecture. Is that, again, something that you are planning for? Do you see a world where that kind of span of control will widen even further through the use of AI?
Josh Araujo
>> Absolutely. Controlling one vehicle or even tasking one vehicle is somewhat interesting, but being able to task groups of vehicle with intent-based tasking, search this area, search and destroy in this area, or intent-based tasking and allow those robots to self-organize depending on what payload they have. "Hey, I'm a sensor. Hey, I'm a weapon. Hey, I'm transporting materials or goods." And have those vehicles self-identify what they're capable of, and then coordinate amongst multiple vehicles to accomplish an in state, much as you would with a group of soldiers, "Hey, I need you to go and search this area or go into this building."
You're giving intent-based tasking and not... You think of a driver in the wheel driving versus remotely operating versus one vehicle tasking, really the in state here and something we're deploying today is intent-based tasking across multiple assets. And that's really the agent-based autonomy on top of the AI that we're deploying for self-driving.
Gemma Allen
>> And you straddle two worlds, right? Defense and commercial and those two things, one, I guess, kind of conflict they have sometimes is speed. Tell me a little bit about that. What are your R&D cycles like? What sorts of timeframes do you guys work against and how are those, I guess, speeding up in this new kind of agent and AI world?
Josh Araujo
>> I'd say that you talk to any company that's dual use, they will tell you it's particularly challenging because again, you have different timelines, different paces. What we tend to focus on is areas that have very similar overlap. If you think of industrial logistics applications, you need for robots to be operating autonomously, you need very high uptime, all weather conditions. You have to be GPS and comms resilient. You have to operate in all kinds of environments, unstructured environments. And so we've really narrowed our focus on commercial industrial applications to these environments that are almost identical to what you would expect in a military environment. I think the reason for that for us is if you look at some of the most successful deployments of technology into department of war and in the military, these are technologies that are well adopted in commercial applications. And so for us, it's a great forcing function to make sure that our technology is always at a price point, a quality, a capability that a commercial end user would acquire and move into their formations. Because if you can't take that technology and sell it to a Walmart, Amazon, a Proctor and Gamble to do their logistics operations, then you probably have no business giving it to an 18 to 24 year old war fighter. So you want to make sure that it remains relevant as one. And two, it's just another means to bring down the pricing, the economies of scale. It opens up a market for the technology. And again, for me personally, it's a means for us to be able to sell a more cost-effective, more reliable product to that 18 to 25 year old who's out there doing that difficult mission.
Gemma Allen
>> It's all about usability, I guess, right? And mass utility. So interesting.
Josh Araujo
>> Absolutely.
Gemma Allen
>> I actually never thought about it from that perspective. So Series C, tell me what's ahead for the next 12 to 18 months. What's the plan after this raise? What's the growth, hopes, dreams?
Josh Araujo
>> Look, it is deploying more systems at scale. We're in the early innings. Like I said, this year we'll deploy in the hundreds of vehicles and hundreds of systems. It's really getting prepared to deliver in the thousands and not just vehicles, but additional payload integrations, additional partnerships. So how do we make these systems, for lack of a better term, the Swiss Army knife for that soldier in the field? How do I get the most utility out of this system that has self-driving, that has edge compute, that has communication and a bunch of sensors? How do we make that as relevant and useful as possible, and adaptable as possible as the situation evolves in these various conflicts? And so it's really taken that Series C investment and continuing to expand our product capability, expand our partnerships, expand our footprint internationally, and really trying to get this technology as fast as possible into the hands of the people that matter the most.
Gemma Allen
>> Tell me, any plans to see you here ringing that bell one day, Josh?
Josh Araujo
>> We will see. I think we're heads down focused on the business and focused on our customer, but as we continue to grow and scale, I wouldn't rule it out that we'll be out here at some point.
Gemma Allen
>> Well, we look forward to hopefully seeing that. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE.
Josh Araujo
>> Thanks for having me.
Gemma Allen
>> I'm Gemma Allen here at the NYSC. This is our physical AI series. Thanks so much for watching.
Gemma Allen