Shifters Debuts AI-Native Ground Autonomy Stack at Eurosatory 2026

Shifters, a US-Israeli robotics startup, will publicly debut its AI-native ground autonomy product ecosystem at Eurosatory 2026 in Paris this week, the company announced Monday. The three-part stack pairs an operator-command layer with a multi-robot orchestration layer and a rugged ground platform built to enter collapsed structures, tunnels and other dangerous environments before human teams move in. The company’s pitch is that sending robots first, not people, is finally a working pattern rather than a slogan.

The unveiling follows a freshly closed $10.2 million seed round that pushed the company’s total funding since its 2023 founding to $15 million, and lands the week before the show floor in Paris opens to the broader defense industry.

RITA, ARENA, and TRUST

The stack is built around three named layers. RITA, short for Robotic Intent To Action, is the operator-command layer that takes an operator’s mission intent and translates it into robotic tasking. ARENA, the Autonomous Robotic Execution and Nexus Architecture, sits beneath it and coordinates navigation, sensing and execution across a team of robots. TRUST, the Tactical Robot for Unmanned Safety and Security Tasks, is the rugged ground platform that carries the software stack into the real world.

Shifters calls the architecture AI-native because the autonomy, not the hardware, is the product, per the announcement. The hardware is built around NVIDIA AI processors with edge-optimized models designed to operate under the weight, power, thermal and size constraints of a deployable ground platform. The system is designed so a single operator can supervise a coordinated robotic team, with each robot sharing information, dividing tasks dynamically, and responding collectively to changes in the environment.

The handoff between RITA and ARENA is the part the press release highlights. An operator can define an objective in natural language, like clearing a corridor, and RITA decomposes it into sub-tasks. ARENA then assigns those sub-tasks to whichever robots in the team are best positioned to handle them, with the team coordinating movement, sensing, and execution autonomously, the company said.

The intent-to-action translation is what the company means when it calls the stack ‘AI-native’ rather than ‘AI-augmented.’ It is also the part that has to work in the live demo on the show floor in Paris, and the part the rest of the defense robotics market is now trying to match.

Shifters’ Live Demo at Booth C213

At Booth C213 in Hall 5A, Shifters will run a live demonstration of multiple autonomous ground robots operating as a coordinated team under the supervision of a single human operator. The operator defines the operational boundaries, including mission intent, permissions and intervention thresholds, and the team of robots coordinates its own movement, sensing and tasking inside them, per the announcement.

The four scenarios the demo will emulate are:

• Disaster response and search and rescue in collapsed, subterranean or structurally unstable environments
• Perimeter and site security for critical infrastructure, ports, energy facilities, data centers and industrial campuses
• Remote sensing and inspection in hazardous, degraded or inaccessible environments
• Dangerous-entry assessment before workers, first responders or security teams are placed at risk

Each profile maps to a different buyer. Search and rescue pulls in first-responder agencies and civil-protection ministries. Perimeter and site security is the language of ports, energy operators, data centers and industrial campuses. Dangerous-entry assessment is the military use case, and the pilot work at the U.S. Army and Israel’s Ministry of Defense has already begun to touch it. The demo is structured to show how a single stack can serve all four.

The Seed Round’s Three Targets

The Eurosatory debut lands on the back of a freshly closed funding round. Shifters raised $10.2 million in seed funding, led by Ace Capital Partners, the company confirmed on June 3, with Aurelius Capital Management, Corner Ventures and Arkin Capital also participating. Combined with prior capital, the round brings the company’s total funding since its 2023 founding to $15 million, the company said.

The capital is targeted at three things, per Shifters’ earlier statements. First, further AI development. Second, commercial production readiness. Third, expansion across the U.S., European and Middle Eastern markets. Most of the last three years have been R&D alongside pilot users, and the new money is meant to push the company from pilot-scale production into larger runs.

Co-founder and CTO Assaf Chaprak described the demand from clients as ‘massive’ in a Tectonic Defense interview, and said the new round would let Shifters ‘expand our production lines and set up new production lines in order to fulfill the need.’ That language signals a transition the company has been telegraphing for months, with production-line scaling now the explicit goal.

The One-Operator, Many-Robots Bet

Shifters frames the technology as a replacement for the single-remote-control model that still dominates ground robotics in defense and security. An operator who has to drive every robot by hand cannot scale to a team. The company is betting on one operator, many robots as its model for the next phase of ground robotics.

The next leap in ground robotics is not a better remote-controlled machine. It is the ability for one operator to supervise coordinated robotic teams that can enter, sense and operate in dangerous environments before people are exposed.

The line above is from Shifters CEO and co-founder Ofer Balin, and it sits at the top of the company’s product page as the central thesis. Alon Lifshitz, founding partner at Aurelius Capital, framed the company as one of the harder categories in defense technology to build. ‘In defense technology, the hardest companies to build are the ones that have to move from breakthrough technology to field-ready products,’ Lifshitz said in the announcement. ‘Shifters has the rare combination of operational understanding, technical depth and market timing that will build a category-defining company.’ The seed round, the booth in Paris, and the pilots with the U.S. Army are all being wagered on that thesis.

From Israeli Air Force to a D.C. Headquarters

Shifters was founded in 2023 by chief executive Ofer Balin and Assaf Chaprak, who serves as president, CTO and co-founder. Chaprak served in the Israeli Air Force, most recently as a major, and later worked for video and computer vision technology companies in the U.S., according to an interview he gave Tectonic Defense earlier this month. The company is now headquartered in Washington, D.C., with operations in the U.S., Middle East and Europe.

Before the public debut, Shifters said it had run demonstrations and pilot programs with ‘clients in the security and national security domain,’ including units within the U.S. Army, and had been working alongside Israel’s Ministry of Defense and its Directorate of Defense Research and Development. The TRUST platform itself is described as payload-agnostic, a ‘tray with legs‘ that can carry ISR sensors, manipulators, mesh communications nodes, or other mission-specific hardware, in Chaprak’s words to Tectonic Defense.

The D.C. headquarters is the operational center for the company’s pitch. Chaprak’s Israeli Air Force experience, by his own account, is part of the credibility behind it. The pilot work with the U.S. Army and Israel Ministry of Defense provides the customer-side credibility to match.

The Eurosatory Show Floor

• 2,000+ exhibitors at the 2024 edition (the most recent full edition)
• 76,000+ participants at the 2024 edition
• 185,000+ square meters of exhibition space at the 2026 edition
• 93 countries sending official delegations to the 2026 edition

Eurosatory is the world’s leading regularly scheduled land-defense and security trade show, held biennially at Paris Nord Villepinte. The most recent full edition, in 2024, featured more than 2,000 exhibitors and 76,000 participants, per the show’s organizers. The 2026 edition runs June 15-19 at Paris Nord Villepinte, per Eurosatory 2026 dates and venue details, expanding into a new hall and covering more than 185,000 square meters of exhibition space, the show’s general manager Charles Beaudouin said in a statement.

Shifters is taking that stage in Booth C213 in Hall 5A, which in past editions has housed unmanned systems and robotics exhibitors. The defense show’s themes for 2026 include multi-domain superiority, remote engagement, land manoeuvre, and air mobility, putting supervised ground autonomy directly inside the program. Speakers include Catherine Vautrin, France’s Minister of the Armed Forces, and European Commissioner for Defense and Space Andrius Kubilius. Other ground-robotics players will be on the show floor too. Shifters is bringing a connected stack that pairs command software with the rugged platform underneath it, and the live demo is the first chance for prospective buyers to watch it work end-to-end in front of the full international defense procurement audience.

What Remains Before Robots Go First

The ‘Robots Go First’ framing still has weight to carry. Chaprak told Tectonic Defense that the TRUST platform will reach TRL 8, possibly 9, by the end of 2026. TRL 8 typically means a system has been demonstrated in its operational environment, while TRL 9 means it has been proven in real missions. Shifters has not published a list of operational deployments in its announcement materials, beyond the pilots with the U.S. Army and Israel’s Ministry of Defense.

Production is the second open question. Chaprak described the demand from clients as ‘massive’ in a Tectonic Defense interview. The seed round gives Shifters the runway to stand up larger production lines, but it does not yet fund the kind of multi-year manufacturing contracts a defense prime would expect.

‘We’ve arrived at an era where it’s finally technologically feasible to take people out of harm’s way and allow robots to go first,’ Chaprak told Tectonic Defense. The Eurosatory booth is where the company either converts that pitch into purchase orders or goes home with more pilots.