Supports Company's Ability To Scale To Meet Growing Global Demand For Trueview Radar System

Fortem Technologies has closed a $15 million Series A funding round led by DCVC (Data Collective) with key participation from Boeing, the world's largest aerospace company, and Mubadala Investment Company, as well as Manifest Growth, New Ground Ventures and founding investor, Signia Venture Partners.

Fortem Technologies provides the world's most compact, high-performance radar system for detecting airborne objects, a revolutionary safety capability for unmanned and manned aircraft. The Fortem TrueView radar system is small enough to be deployed on an aircraft to allow customers to build intrinsically safe air taxis and helicopters, as well as unmanned aerial vehicles that can operate autonomously beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS).

Safe BVLOS operations are crucial for the future of autonomous air vehicles.

"By cracking the difficult BVLOS challenge, we unlock emerging forms of flight, including everything from autonomous air taxis to lifesaving deliveries," said Timothy Bean, CEO of Fortem Technologies, Inc. "With the wonderful support from all our investors and the addition of Boeing and Mubadala, Fortem can scale more quickly to simultaneously improve airspace safety and secure critical infrastructure."

The Fortem TrueView radar system can simultaneously track thousands of objects—each smaller than a soda can, travelling at high velocity, across a 360-degree field of view. Lightweight and low power, TrueView R20 weighs only 1.5 pounds and consumes less power than an LED street light.

"By delivering proven, powerful and compact radar systems for safe unmanned flight, Fortem Technologies supports Boeing's commitment to the responsible introduction of future autonomous air vehicles," said Steve Nordlund, VP of Boeing HorizonX.

"Mubadala is excited to work with Fortem and its outstanding leadership team to help grow its business to new markets," said Ibrahim Ajami, Head of Mubadala Ventures. "We strongly believe the TrueView radar is essential to maintain a safe airspace for both the aircraft and the critical infrastructure on the ground."

Fortem Technologies is building ground-based intelligent airspace monitoring systems for BVLOS drone corridors and active "Drone No Fly Zone" protection. These systems can scale from a single building to an entire metropolitan area. The system becomes an intelligent network of mobile and fixed locations creating a detection fabric that permeates an entire region, delivering a real-time data stream of the location and velocity of all airborne objects.

"Fortem keeps the airspace safe from building to metropolitan scale, while also delivering solutions to actively detect and safely remove drones that pose a threat to critical infrastructure," said Matt Ocko, Managing Partner at DCVC. "This kind of breakthrough airspace safety requires distributed radar intelligence on the ground, and on drones, all fast, accurate, low-power and cost-effective at scale. We've seen everything in this arena, and we are doubling down on our investment in Fortem because literally no one else can do this."

When necessary, this intelligent airspace system can then dispatch security resources, including fleets of Fortem DroneHunters.  DroneHunters are fully autonomous BVLOS hunter drones, guided by the long range onboard Fortem TrueView radar system -- fused with other sensors -- to safely remove any drone from a no fly zone without risk to civilians.

"Fortem's disciplined approach to solving complex and pressing airspace safety challenges is impressive," said Ed Cluss, Managing Director of Signia Venture Partners. "They continue to execute against their plans while innovating in areas that have proved challenging for the industry and we believe they can help fuel the promise of a drone economy."

(Image provided with Fortem Technologies news release)

FMI: www.fortemtech.com