Ep. 74 - How Forterra Acquired goTenna in 72 Hours
Crossing the Valley
Long timelines and the muscle to sustain field ops
Both guests emphasize decades of work, field sustainment, and customer success as the true moat for defense tech.
What happens when a Friday morning coffee turns into a term sheet by Sunday night?
In this episode, Forterra CEO Josh Araujo is joined by Ari Schuler, a returning CTV guest, to take us inside Forterra’s acquisition of goTenna.
Company Overview
About Forterra: Ground autonomy company enabling war fighters to shoot, move, and communicate more effectively. Technical stack includes autonomous driving systems, mission payload integration, and now mesh communications through the goTenna acquisition. Working with military customers across operational theaters. Founded 20+ years ago (as Robotic Research), recently closed Series C while simultaneously acquiring goTenna.
About goTenna: Mesh networking communications company providing interoperable comms, born from Hurricane Sandy in Brooklyn. Pivoted from consumer to military/public safety after discovering product-market fit with operators in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the southern border. Technology enables high node-count networks (100+ devices) sending low-bandwidth position/location data, critical for blue force tracking and preventing friendly fire.
About our Guests
About Josh Araujo: CEO of Forterra, building autonomous ground vehicle technology for military operations. Retired Marine, and Jefferies investment banker covering aerospace and defense. Joined Forterra (then Robotic Research) in 2021 as the first non-technical hire, now leading a company with 20+ years of autonomy innovation transitioning to programs of record.
About Ari Schuler: Former CEO of goTenna, now leading the communications division at Forterra. Built goTenna’s pivot from consumer to B2G, deploying mesh networking technology in conflict zones globally. Former DHS official who created Customs and Border Protection (CBP)’s innovation team, bringing government operator perspective to commercial tech development.
Key Takeaways
1. Skip the vitamin, find the medicine.
Ari’s mentor gave him a deceptively simple framework: are you selling something people want (vitamins), or something they can’t live without (medicine)? goTenna started as a consumer product, but product-market fit became unmistakable once the technology hit Afghanistan, Iraq, and the southern border. Ari explains that when you found the true medicinal use case, you go all in. Straddling consumer and government markets wastes capital and credibility that companies don’t have to spare.
2. The ability to sustain operations in the field is the real moat.
Both Forterra and goTenna had extraordinary technical pedigrees: Forterra’s co-founder holds 100+ patents, and goTenna’s mesh protocols are proprietary and deeply differentiated. But Josh was explicit: deploying at scale into combat environments is “miles apart” from having a cool demo. The muscle required to do customer success, field maintenance, and operational support in places like Afghanistan or Ukraine is not taught in any graduate program.
3. In M&A, cultural alignment is what ultimately determines deal success or failure.
The core of the conversation centers on how Josh turned a term sheet around in 72 hours, from a Friday morning coffee between Ari and Scott Sanders (another CTV alum), to an afternoon board meeting, to a signed term sheet by Sunday night. This kind of speed is not only a function of high caliber financial modeling and expertise, but of a clear strategic rationale and cultural fit. Josh talked about his view that even the best business alignment in the world can’t overcome a cultural mismatch. Culture doesn’t mean squishy values in this case. It refers to the companies’ shared mission focus, values, and tech stack (NetSuite, Arena, JIRA).
4. The defense VC funding model is creating a structural problem for which consolidation is the only solution.
Josh flagged a concern that most defense tech founders are quietly aware of: many of the best companies in this space have great technology, great teams, and genuine product-market fit, but lack venture-scale TAMs. VC math requires one in a hundred to go 100x. At the risk of sounding trite, that calculus alone will not support the entire ecosystem of mission-critical hardware businesses. As a result, if venture is the primary tool, companies that shouldn’t fail will fail because of capital structure problems. This is why Josh is shaping Forterra into a leading consolidator to create a home for these companies.
5. In a post-merger integration, the first priority is “do not break what’s working for the customer.”
Too many post-merger integration efforts try to move fast, combine everything, and extract synergies. In this deal, Josh and Forterra explicitly rejected this. The approach has been phased and deliberate: first, validate the technology combination (goTenna’s X2m module was physically integrated into Forterra’s Vector platform within 30 days, achieving 25x the range of the previous radio). Second, resource the acquired team to execute on their existing pipeline. Third, after the teams have developed organic trust, start to combine go-to-market and engineering functions. This cadence matters because defense vendors cannot afford to push artificial disruptions on their customers. As Ari explains, “We can figure out the HR systems. What we can’t do is mess up operational deployments.” The customer relationship is paramount.
For more:
* LinkedIn: Forterra | goTenna
* Follow Josh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-araujo/
* Follow Ari: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ari-schuler-1ab93239/
* Follow Crossing the Valley: https://www.linkedin.com/company/102082197/
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