When you’ve spent over a decade building machines to clear landmines, your view of safety hits different. Samuel Reeves didn’t just wake up one day and decide to tackle machine control, he earned that conviction in the realest way possible: by watching how fragile the handshake is between man and machine when the stakes are life and death.
That experience laid the groundwork for FORT Robotics, the Philly-based startup that’s quietly becoming the nervous system for intelligent machines worldwide. Founded in 2018 by Samuel Reeves, Wharton grad, founder of Humanistic Robotics, and someone who’s been inside the blast radius of automation, FORT isn’t selling you robot hype. They’re building the actual infrastructure that makes autonomy trustworthy.
And now, they’ve got a fresh $18.9M in fuel, bringing their Series B to a fat $60.5M total. Led once again by Tiger Global, with new names like Neman Ventures, Mana Ventures, Gaingels, and Ryuu Co. of Japan stepping onto the field, this isn’t just a cap table flex, it’s a signal. When both repeat believers and new backers double down, you pay attention.
The why is simple: FORT’s Robotics Control Platform is giving builders and operators a SIL 3-certified command center for real-world autonomy. Not Metaverse toys. We’re talking deployed, revenue-generating systems across construction, defense, agriculture, warehousing, and beyond. Over 12,000 units out in the wild. Trusted by 60+ Fortune1000. 27 patents locked. That’s not a prototype, it’s a platform that works under pressure.
What Nathan Bivans, FORT’s Certified Machine Safety Expert and CTO, is building alongside Samuel Reeves feels like the TCP/IP moment for robotics. A tamper-proof, cybersecurity-rigorous, API-savvy control layer that speaks across protocols, WiFi, BLE, Ethernet, ISM bands, and puts functional safety in the DNA of every autonomous operation. Because letting a machine roam free without safety and control is like tossing your car keys to a Labrador and hoping for the best.
With fresh board firepower in Kirk D. Brown, Jorge Heraud, and Benjamin G. Wolff, all battle-tested operators who’ve taken companies public, private, and global, FORT is about to do what legacy OEMs can’t: scale safe autonomy without putting humans in the crosshairs.
There’s a reason this isn’t coming out of Silicon Valley. Philly’s grit and precision engineering DNA runs deep here. It’s not about shiny demos. It’s about making autonomy reliable. And if you’re building, deploying, or operating intelligent machines, you might want to ask yourself: what’s protecting your tech when the network drops, the signal jams, or your code glitches?
