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Anduril Is Expanding to Long Beach

The Anduril empire just keeps on growing. Yesterday, the defense tech giant announced that it’s opening up a new 1M+ square-foot campus in Long Beach, CA, where the firm (can’t really call it a startup anymore, can we?) says it will carry out everything from software development to R&D. An Anduril spokesperson told Tectonic that […]

Tech

Exclusive: Picogrid Makes Fast Friends in the Desert

It’s a Picogrid party, and everyone’s invited.  Today, in an exclusive release to Tectonic, integration startup Picogrid announced that the US Army tapped them to make sure a whole bunch of different sensors, radars, C2 systems, and effectors worked together during a recent sensor-to-shooter counter-drone and force-maneuver exercise at the National Training Center in the […]

Tech

Exclusive: Applied Intuition and the Department of Energy Team Up on Golden Dome

Applied Intuition may have cut its teeth in commercial autonomous vehicle software, but the $15B Silicon Valley hotshot is taking the defense world by storm—including on some of the Pentagon’s most ambitious projects.  We’re talking Golden Dome, baby.  Today, in an exclusive release to Tectonic, Applied Intuition announced that they’ve teamed up with the Department […]

Q + A

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, […]

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Q + A

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

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 […]

Q + A

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 […]

Q + A

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 […]