FORT Robotics Secures US$20 Million Ahead of Nasdaq Listing

FORT Robotics secured approximately US$20 million in new commitments from existing investors on October 22, 2026, split between a roughly US$10 million financing led by Tiger Global and a separate US$10 million common equity PIPE tied to the Philadelphia company's pending business combination with Newbury Street II Acquisition Corp (Nasdaq: NTWO). Mark Cuban Companies participated alongside Tiger Global. Committed capital for the broader combination, including previously announced PIPE commitments, now exceeds US$50 million, and the combined entity is expected to list on Nasdaq under the ticker FROB once the deal closes and clears regulatory approval.

FORT Robotics builds what it calls the Trust Layer for physical AI, a distributed safety and control system that bundles safety-certified hardware, software and professional services so robot and autonomous-vehicle fleets can meet functional safety standards without each operator engineering a certified stop-and-control system from scratch. The company's products include the Wireless E-Stop Pro, a wearable remote stop device certified to Safety Integrity Level 3 under IEC 61508 with a range up to 200 meters, and a broader Endpoint Controller and Vehicle Safety Controller receiver line that lets a single handset halt multiple machines at once.

Why a Safety Vendor Is the One Raising Money Right Now

FORT's position in the robotics supply chain explains why it can raise capital in a financing environment that has turned more selective toward pure hardware plays. The company does not build robots; it certifies that other people's robots can be stopped safely, a function regulators and insurers increasingly require before an autonomous system can operate near people at all. Founded in 2018 by Samuel Reeves, who previously built Humanistic Robotics to clear landmines, FORT has grown to hold 25 patents, deploy more than 19,500 safety units, and serve over 600 customers that include Agility Robotics, DoorDash, Cobot, Zoox, Textron and Google DeepMind, a customer list that spans humanoid robotics, delivery robots, warehouse automation and defense, rather than concentrating in any single application.

Griffin Schroeder, a partner at Tiger Global, said FORT plays a critical role in building an independent safety layer, and cited continued conviction in the market opportunity as the basis for the firm's increased commitment, a notable vote of confidence from an investor that has backed FORT since leading its Series B in 2022. Reeves, FORT's founder and chief executive, said the additional capital gives the company resources to scale its team and operating capacity in response to growing demand from warehousing, defense, construction and other markets adopting autonomous systems, framing the raise as demand-driven rather than defensive.

The SPAC Route Is the More Telling Decision

FORT's choice to go public through a business combination with a blank-check company, rather than a traditional IPO or continued private funding, deserves more scrutiny than the financing amount itself. SPAC mergers fell out of favor with many growth-stage technology companies after the wave of 2021 and 2022 listings that struggled to hit post-merger financial projections, and a safety-infrastructure company choosing that route in 2026 signals either confidence that FORT's numbers can withstand public market scrutiny faster than a traditional IPO timeline would allow, or a calculation that the SPAC structure's negotiated valuation certainty was worth more than the typically higher proceeds a traditional roadshow can generate in a strong market.

The additional US$20 million announced this week is not new primary capital for FORT's own balance sheet in the way a conventional funding round would be; the US$10 million PIPE specifically backstops the pending combination with Newbury Street II, meaning its main function is making sure the SPAC deal has enough committed capital to close on schedule rather than funding new product development directly. That distinction matters for how buyers and competitors should read the announcement: it is a signal that FORT's path to a Nasdaq listing is proceeding and attracting continued investor support, not evidence of a new product line or expanded safety-certification scope beyond what FORT has already disclosed.

The reported deal terms put FORT's pro forma enterprise value at roughly US$557 million, a figure that places the company well below the multi-billion valuations commanded by humanoid robot makers such as Figure or Apptronik, but ahead of most standalone industrial-safety software vendors, reflecting FORT's position as infrastructure that sits underneath many different robot categories rather than a single product line competing for end-customer budget directly. That positioning is also why FORT's growth has tracked the broader autonomous-systems market's expansion rather than any single humanoid or AMR vendor's fortunes: every new category of robot entering a warehouse, construction site or defense application is a potential Trust Layer customer, regardless of which hardware maker wins that category.

Building Out the Stack Beyond a Single E-Stop

FORT has spent 2026 expanding beyond its original wireless stop-button product into a broader safety platform, a pattern worth noting for buyers assessing whether the company can support a fleet's full lifecycle rather than just its emergency-stop requirement. In May 2026, FORT acquired Mapless AI, a teleoperation and autonomy-supervision company, adding remote supervision capability to what had been primarily a stop-and-control product line. In June 2026, FORT joined the NVIDIA Halos for Robotics ecosystem, pairing its own sensor-based safety approach with external infrastructure sensors and visual AI agents, an "outside-in" safety layer that supplements a robot's own onboard sensors with site-level monitoring. Together, those two moves reposition FORT from a single hardware product into a fuller safety and supervision stack spanning stop control, remote oversight and infrastructure-level monitoring, which is the more defensible competitive position heading into a public listing than a company still selling one certified device.

What a Public FORT Means for Robotics Safety Procurement

For procurement and engineering teams currently evaluating safety-certification vendors for a robot or autonomous-vehicle fleet, a publicly listed FORT Robotics changes the vendor-risk calculation in a specific way: public financial disclosure requirements would give customers visibility into FORT's balance sheet and cash runway that a privately held safety vendor does not provide, a meaningful consideration for any operator planning to depend on FORT's certified hardware and software for years of deployment across a fleet that cannot easily be re-certified under a different vendor's system mid-contract.

That dependency works in both directions. A customer such as Zoox or Agility Robotics that has already built FORT's Trust Layer into its safety architecture faces real switching costs if FORT's public listing stumbles or its stock performance pressures the company toward cost-cutting that affects certification support or hardware reliability. Against that risk sits the advantage a public listing is meant to provide: permanent capital that does not need to be renegotiated through private funding rounds every 18 to 24 months, the same funding-cycle risk that has disrupted product roadmaps at other safety and compliance vendors mid-contract. A buyer weighing FORT against a privately held competitor should treat the pending Nasdaq listing as a long-term stability signal worth factoring into a multi-year safety-certification contract, while still confirming FORT's specific safety integrity level certifications and patent coverage against the exact machines and environments the buyer plans to deploy, rather than assuming the IEC 61508 certification on one product line automatically extends to every device in FORT's catalog.

The number worth holding onto from this week's announcement is not the US$20 million itself, which is a relatively modest sum against FORT's reported more than US$50 million in total committed combination capital, but the 19,500 safety units FORT says it has already deployed across 600 customers spanning warehousing, delivery, defense and humanoid robotics: a safety layer that has already scaled across that many operational fleets before going public is a materially different proposition than one still proving out its first few hundred units. Competing functional-safety vendors serving the same autonomous-systems market, from certified component suppliers to systems integrators offering safety consulting as a service, have mostly stayed private or been absorbed into larger industrial automation groups rather than pursuing an independent public listing, which makes FORT's SPAC route something of a test case for whether safety infrastructure specifically, as distinct from the robots it protects, can support a standalone public company at meaningful scale.

That test matters beyond FORT's own cap table. If the Newbury Street II combination closes on schedule and FORT trades as a going concern on Nasdaq, it gives every other safety-certification and functional-safety vendor in robotics a public comparable to point to when raising its own next round, the kind of reference valuation that has been largely absent from this specific corner of the autonomous-systems supply chain. If the deal stalls or FORT's public performance disappoints, the opposite lesson follows just as quickly: that safety infrastructure, however essential to deploying robots near people, is still viewed by public markets as a component business rather than a platform company, which would push the next generation of safety vendors back toward acquisition by a larger industrial group instead of an independent listing.

This article synthesizes FORT Robotics' and Tiger Global's October 22, 2026, financing announcement and FORT's publicly disclosed company history. It is for general information purposes only and does not constitute investment, financial or professional advice.