FORT Robotics Secures $20M in New Funding Commitments

A tablet holder gives Agility Robotics' humanoid a place to carry a human's authority. The custom component integrates emergency-stop and enabling-device functions, part of a relationship with FORT Robotics that the companies now propose to extend across Digit 5's safety architecture.

That engineering relationship helps explain FORT's approximately $20M in new funding commitments, announced on October 22, 2026. Tiger Global is leading about $10M in financing with Mark Cuban Companies participating, expected to close this week; a separate $10M Tiger Global PIPE commitment is expected to close with the proposed Newbury Street II Acquisition Corp business combination. The Philadelphia company plans to expand its team and operating capacity as customers bring autonomous machines into shared workplaces.

Two financing commitments with different closing conditions

FORT's announcement puts capital behind both immediate operations and a proposed public-market transaction. The near-term financing and the common-equity PIPE have different closing conditions, so the roughly $20M should be read as commitments rather than cash already received. FORT says total committed capital in connection with its proposed business combination now exceeds $50M, including previously announced commitments.

The October announcement follows the August 18 business-combination agreement. Newbury Street II trades under NTWO; the combined company expects to adopt the FORT Robotics Holdings name and FROB ticker upon closing, subject to approvals. FORT is still describing a proposed transaction, with its public-company identity dependent on that process.

Tiger Global's relationship reaches back to the 2022 Series B. In August 2025, FORT announced an additional $18.9M Series B close, reporting $60.5M in total funding at that time. Keeping the dates attached matters: a historical closed-funding total and a new set of conditional commitments answer different questions about the resources available to management.

The allocation of the first approximately $10M between Tiger Global and Mark Cuban Companies was not disclosed. FORT identifies team expansion and operating capacity as intended uses, with opportunities in warehousing, defense, construction and other autonomous-system markets. Those plans put the attention on the organization required to support deployments.

A safety supplier moves further into the customer's work

Samuel Reeves founded FORT in 2018 after working in landmine clearance. The company's current leadership includes founding CTO Nathan Bivans, bringing the business back to a demanding assignment: give people dependable ways to control machines while allowing useful autonomous work to proceed. FORT sells hardware, software and services around that assignment.

The October 1 agreement with Agility makes the commercial progression unusually visible. The companies signed an MOU outlining a deeper relationship around Digit 5, building on several years of component work. The proposed architecture includes a safety pendant, communications on the robot and interfaces connecting the robot to safety systems around it.

Agility describes the pendant as a way to monitor Digit and provide an independent manual override during setup, maintenance or unexpected situations. A humanoid can work autonomously during normal operation while preserving those moments of human intervention. The engineering has to account for both uses without asking the customer to improvise the handoff.

The proposed partnership extends into joint hardware development, solutions engineering, regulatory compliance and deployment support. For FORT, that reaches beyond supplying a component into work that continues as the customer's environment changes. The MOU describes intended collaboration; the announcement supplies no contract value or completed Digit 5 rollout from which to calculate revenue.

Connectivity and control become deployment requirements

FORT's Trust Layer organizes the product around human intervention, onboard safety logic and information from the surrounding environment. A site can contain robots from different manufacturers, people moving between tasks and sensors that observe different parts of the same space. Connecting those inputs creates an engineering responsibility that extends beyond any single robot's perception.

The Wireless E-Stop Pro provides a concrete example of the control side. FORT lists stop, crawl and pause commands, dual-channel monitoring and SIL 3 certification per IEC61508 by Exida. That product specification has a defined scope; the design and operation of an entire customer installation still require their own safety work.

On October 14, FORT introduced Connectivity Aggregation, software designed to combine cellular, satellite, Wi-Fi and tactical radio networks into one adaptive connection. The company says it is rolling out with several defense customers and can run on customer hardware. Named customers and independent performance measurements for those deployments were not disclosed.

The commercial implication is practical. Remote supervision needs a route for information and commands when an individual network becomes unreliable, making communications part of the machine's operating design. Integration and support become part of the purchase because the customer's work continues through changing network conditions, locations and equipment configurations.

Scaling the organization around installed machines

FORT reports more than 19,500 deployed units and over 600 customers, including Agility Robotics, DoorDash, Cobot, Zoox, Textron and Google DeepMind. Those are company-reported deployment and customer counts, which describe a broader installed base than one humanoid partnership. They do not specify how revenue is distributed across products or customers.

That breadth shapes the work the new capital is intended to support. A warehousing deployment and a defense application may share a need for safe control while requiring different integration, communications and operating support. FORT's current careers page lists a Functional Safety Manager, Embedded Software Engineer II and Great Lakes account executive, illustrating the engineering and commercial functions it is recruiting for rather than proving how the financing will be allocated.

The surrounding investment activity also spans different layers of robotics. DevCuration's coverage of Generalist AI's model development and Antioch's physical AI simulation offers context for the software being built around machines. FORT's place in that ecosystem follows the customer into control, integration and everyday use.

At Agility, the next engineering work is already described in the MOU: connect the pendant, the robot and the external safety interfaces while supporting deployments into more complex environments. FORT's operating expansion has a specific destination there, alongside the people who must keep Digit useful during a workday that includes maintenance, intervention and changing conditions.