Forterra

Before founding the company that became Forterra, Alberto Lacaze was a staff engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where he worked on robotic perception, planning, and control for unmanned ground vehicles and won the NIST Jacob Rabinow Applied Research Award for that work. He holds Bachelor of Science degrees in electrical engineering and computer engineering from the Florida Institute of Technology and a master's in electrical engineering from Drexel University. In 2002 he co-founded Robotic Research with fellow NIST engineer Karl Murphy, building it into one of the largest providers of ground-autonomy capability to the U.S. Department of Defense — including the DoD's first fully autonomous convoy vehicles deployed for logistics — as well as autonomous shuttles and transit buses for commercial OEMs. The company rebranded as Forterra in February 2024 as it leaned into defense-focused autonomy. Lacaze, who holds more than 100 robotics patents, serves as Forterra's President and Chairman of the Board.

Karl Murphy spent his early career at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where he was technical lead for the Demo I, Demo II, and Demo III unmanned ground vehicle programs — the foundational U.S. Army autonomy demonstrations of the 1990s. His research spans control software for on- and off-road autonomous vehicles, LADAR-based terrain perception, navigation sensors, and Kalman filtering, contributing to DoD programs including PerceptOR, FCS, and ANS. He holds a BS in mechanical engineering from Virginia Tech (1981) and an MS in mechanical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University (1984). In 2002 he co-founded Robotic Research with Alberto Lacaze, translating their NIST unmanned-vehicle work into a private company that became a leading supplier of ground autonomy to the Department of Defense before rebranding as Forterra in February 2024. Murphy has continued in a hands-on technical role, serving as Vice President and senior engineer.