Jul. 13—The nation's largest warehouse company and one of the biggest venture capital funds, along with other investors, are betting $25 million that Fort Robotics, a 65-person Philadelphia robotics safety and security systems maker, is ready to grow, fast.
Tiger Global, a New York firm that invests $125 billion for wealthy clients, and Prologis, the San Francisco company that took over Philadelphia's Liberty Property Trust over two years ago on its way to becoming the top U.S. warehouse landlord, are lead investors in the second-round fund-raising for Fort Robotics, based at the former Sun Oil Co. headquarters at 17th and Walnut Streets.
"We are entering a new industrial revolution, where machines can operate on their own, using artificial intelligence and sensors to pick our apples, move our boxes and dig holes for our mines — not just because of labor shortages, but to boost productivity and make life better for humans," said Samuel Reeves, the Penn grad who launched Fort in 2019 after starting Bristol-based Humanistic Robotics to clear land mines after wars.
Reeves said he's already built an engineering team that sells safe, secure machine communications systems to 300 companies, including European machine-controls maker Hexagon Metrology; Agility Robotics, which makes warehouse robots for Amazon; Boston Dynamics, famous for its doglike service robots; Toyota's material-handling affiliate; and John Deere, whose tractors now sport yellow Fort Robotics control boxes, among others.
He plans to use the new cash for operating, sales and marketing staff, and other hires.
"These investors share with us an excitement about the future of an automated society," Reeves added. "In every sector you see automation — construction, agriculture mining, airports, manufacturing. And now warehousing is getting automated, and we have robots going into offices and retail stores."
But those machines face attacks from competitors, foreign governments, and ransom hackers, Reeves said, citing last year's ransom attack by Russian hackers that disrupted Colonial Pipeline gasoline supplies, an earlier Iranian attack on New York's Bowman Street hydroelectric station, and hacker attacks on autonomous vehicles.
"If bank account numbers are stolen, it's a big problem, but when automated machinery is hacked that also creates safety risk in the physical world," he said. Fort designs secure communications systems "to keep humans in the loop, no matter what the machine decides to do."
Clients have built Fort defenses into their communications and control systems, the company says. "Fort's platform is already being utilized by some of the biggest names in automation," Griffin Schroeder, the Tiger partner backing the deal, said in a statement.
Besides Tiger and Prologis, Fort's investors in the new round also include Silicon Valley-based Lemnos, Creative Ventures, and Funders Club; Brazil-based GRIDS Capital; and Compound, of New York. Sineesh Keshav, chief technology officer of Prologis, is joining Fort's board as part of the deal. In a statement, Keshav called Fort an "innovative and game-changing company" that is "extending cybersecurity boundaries" among machines.
Will Prologis or Amazon eventually seek to acquire a company providing what Fort builds? Reeves said he expects to build the company into many other markets besides warehouse automation: "This is a giant, blue-ocean opportunity," he told me. "We are focused on equipment manufacturers. But we are going to be expanding to the end user of the machines — the farmer, the factory owner — so they can monitor the safety and security of all their machines from one pane of glass."
He added, "We are in the middle of an industrial revolution. Safety and security is a critical component of that revolution, that no one owns yet. I think it's a $30 billion a year market. We could be a public company," based in Philadelphia, which Reeves has called a rising center of the robotics world.
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