Latest Stories
Anello Photonics Raises $25M to Scale
Strap in, folks. It’s time to get into the nuts and bolts. On Monday, CA-based silicon photonic optical gyroscope (we’ll get to that) company Anello Photonics announced that it’s raised a cool $25M Series B-2 round led by MESH. New investor Washington Harbour Partners also joined the round, along with existing investors Lockheed Martin Ventures, […]
Exclusive: AV’s LOCUST Laser Gets the FAA and Pentagon’s Seal of Approval
Last month, the FAA quietly announced that it, together with the Pentagon’s JIATF-401 counter-drone task force, carried out “a thorough safety assessment of a high-energy laser counter-drone system.” Well, the cat’s out of the bag. This morning, AV ($AVAV) exclusively revealed to Tectonic that their LOCUST laser was the mystery counter-drone system tested by federal regulators and […]
Exclusive: Somewear Labs Unveils Multi-Network Drone Radio
If you’ve been keeping up with, ya know, everything going on, drones are kind of a big deal right now. The problem is that the one-way attack drones the Pentagon is rushing to get its hands on often rely on high-end MANET and mesh radios—made by Silvus, Persistent Systems, TrellisWare, and other big players—for communications […]
Exclusive: Orqa Launches Independent US Company
Everyone really is making that great, grand leap across the pond. This morning, Croatian drone giant Orqa FPV announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic that it’s spinning out an independent US entity called Orqa US, focused on building end-to-end UAV systems for Drone Dominance. The US company is teaming up with defense contractor By […]
A Q + A with Matt Cronin, Senior National Security Advisor at a16z
If there is one VC fund you know in the defense tech world, it’s probably Andreesen Horowitz—or a16z, as the cool kids say. The firm—which just raised a casual $15B, including $1.176B for its “national interest” (defense and deep tech) focused American Dynamism fund—has backed some of the biggest names in the game, including Anduril, […]
Q + A: A.J. Bertone, Managing Partner, In-Q-Tel
If you’ve been paying attention to the past year of Tectonic (!!), you’ll recognize a sneaky three-letter acronym that pops up on a lot of defense tech cap tables: IQT. For those lucky enough not to be in the know, that stands for In-Q-Tel, a not-for-profit venture fund backed by the US government and investing […]
A Q+A with Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper
Mark Esper has spent a whole heck of a lot of time in the defense ecosystem. After a decade in uniform in the US Army, he worked as a congressional staffer, a senior policy aide to Sens. Chuck Hagel and Bill Frist, and a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the early 2000s. Then, he […]
A Q+A with Alex Ferrara, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners
If there is one fund that knows how to deploy big-time cash into tech companies, it’s Bessemer Venture Partners. The Silicon Valley fund has about $19B under management, and has invested in tech giants from LinkedIn (everyone’s fav) to Shopify. This year, the fund has turned to defense—specifically, European defense. They led Auterion’s $130M Series […]
