More than 100 Forterra autonomous vehicles in Ukraine have completed over 1,100 missions across nine months of live combat operations, the company disclosed this week, marking what it describes as the largest deployment of autonomous ground vehicles in conflict by any US defence-technology firm.
The numbers are specific enough to make the point. Forterra’s gas-powered Lancer ATVs, built on a Polaris platform and fitted with a custom sensor and compute stack, have driven more than 2,500 miles, moved 777,440 pounds of cargo, and completed 52 casualty evacuations since arriving in Ukraine last October.
What Forterra’s Lancer Vehicles Are Actually Doing on the Front Line
The vehicles fill a gap. Ukraine’s own uncrewed ground vehicles are typically battery-powered and carry up to 250 kilograms. The Lancer manages 750 kilograms and runs on petrol, making longer, heavier resupply runs possible in terrain where aerial drones have turned movement into a lethal gamble.
‘There’s nowhere to hide,’ said Sergeant Major Corey Wilkens, who runs the US Army’s autonomous vehicle programme. ‘You become very, very vulnerable to be able to be attacked by [first-person view drones], other sorts of drones dropping munitions, artillery, mortar, the full range of things that they have.’
One unnamed Ukrainian soldier put it more bluntly: ‘It’s fucking fantastic, and we are dying to get more.’ The same soldier said the Lancer is ‘the most important UGV in Ukraine’ for logistics and maintaining defensive positions.
The reception was not always warm. Ukrainian forces have dealt with Western contractors bringing systems tuned to US Army specifications rather than front-line realities. Adding a Starlink satellite antenna resolved enough connectivity problems to change the unit’s view. Some vehicles have been lost, mostly when stuck in deep mud and targeted at leisure by Russian forces.
One demand from Ukrainian operators is straightforward: make them cheaper. ‘Attrition is just a fact of this battlefield, and we have lost a few at this point, and it hurt, and we need more, and therefore we need them cheaper,’ the Ukrainian soldier told TechCrunch. The Lancer benefits from Polaris’s commercial supply chain, but it remains too valuable to treat as a disposable asset the way aerial drones are used.
Forterra Autonomous Vehicles in Ukraine Are Reshaping the Company’s Contract Pipeline
The combat data is already translating into commercial momentum. Forterra and prime contractor Oshkosh Defense secured a US Marine Corps ROGUE-Fires Block 2 Production Award, announced 1 June 2026, and separately received a $92 million order for ROGUE-Fires systems, according to Forterra’s official newsroom.
Separately, the company was awarded a US Government subcontract valued at approximately $1.3 million to integrate Safe Pro Group’s AI-powered threat-detection technology, known as SPOTD, into autonomous UGVs for real-time explosive-threat detection during on-the-move operations. That deal is detailed in a filing on SEC EDGAR from Safe Pro Group (Nasdaq: SPAI).
Forterra has raised more than $500 million in venture funding. Its Series C round of $238 million was led by Moore Strategic Ventures and brought in new investors including Salesforce Ventures, Franklin Templeton, and Balyasny Asset Management, lifting the company’s valuation above $1 billion, according to CityBiz reporting. A prior Series B of $75 million was co-led by Moore Strategic Ventures and XYZ Venture Capital.
The company, which began work on autonomous vehicles 20 years ago, is now working to combine classical robotics algorithms with generative AI that allows machines to respond to their environments in a generalised way. ‘There’s a lot of things you have to do that aren’t available in an open source model because they’re not things that humans do, whether that’s figuring out how to navigate a minefield or [operating] a weapon system,’ Scott Sanders, Forterra’s chief growth officer and a former US Marine officer, told TechCrunch.
One limit is plain. Ukrainian operators have largely been teleoperating the Lancers rather than running them autonomously, partly because the vehicles are too costly to risk and partly because the software is not yet able to identify and react to unexpected enemy contact in real time. ‘We actually need to be able to respond to the enemy threats, live, while it’s in front of the enemy, which the autonomy doesn’t know how to do yet,’ the Ukrainian soldier explained.
Scott Phillips, Forterra’s chief innovation officer, visited a Ukrainian unit’s operations centre to observe the vehicles directly, putting himself within range of Russian attacks. ‘What struck me most was seeing exactly where the seams are: which steps are still manual, where data has to be re-entered or re-verified by hand, and where the team has already found ways to automate or speed things up,’ he told TechCrunch.
Competitors are moving quickly. Scout AI raised a $100 million Series A, described as the largest defence-tech Series A in US history, co-led by Align Ventures and Draper Associates, with participation from Booz Allen Ventures and others, according to a Scout AI press release on PR Newswire. The Silicon Valley firm, founded in 2024 by CEO Colby Adcock and CTO Collin Otis, is building a foundation model called Fury designed to translate commander intent into coordinated action across air, land, sea, and space platforms. Scout AI has also secured $11 million in contracts with the US Department of Defense.
Scout AI is one of 20 autonomy companies whose technology is being evaluated by the US Army’s 1st Cavalry Division during its training cycle at Fort Hood, with products that prove themselves expected to deploy with the unit in 2027, TechCrunch reported. Field AI and Overland AI are also trialling UGVs with the US military.
For Forterra, the 2027 deployment window is the clock to beat. Nine months of live operational data is an advantage few competitors can match, and the ROGUE-Fires production award signals the US military is ready to scale. The question is whether the Lancer’s price can fall fast enough to meet the battlefield’s appetite for attrition.
