Latest Stories
Helsing Officially Launches Area 9, Pushes into Robotics
Well, the dudes (and dudettes) in Germany are diving headfirst into the research game. This morning, German defense tech giant Helsing officially unveiled a new research division it’s calling Area 9, a pie-in-the-sky incubator for European defense tech. Think of it as the Moonshot Factory or Skunk Works, but make it European. As part of […]
Seven Companies Advance to the Navy’s MUSV Prototype Phase
It’s no secret that the Navy wants drone boats, and they want them fast. Well, now we know who’s (probably) going to be building them. Over the weekend, the service named the seven companies—including Saronic, HavocAI (through PacMar Technologies), and Sea Machines—selected to advance to the prototype stage of the medium unmanned surface vessel (MUSV) […]
AV Scores $20M AFRL Contract for Ceramic Materials
We talk a lot about all the zoom and go boom hardware around here, but we don’t spend a lot of time talking about the stuff used to make it. That changes today. Yesterday, AV (the artist formerly known as AeroVironment) announced that it has been awarded a ceramics advanced materials and processes (CAMP) contract […]
Exclusive: Picogrid Raises $45M Series A
Picogrid is proving that teamwork really does make the dream work. This morning, the El Segundo-based hardware and software integration startup announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic that it has raised $45M in a Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners to expand its product family, increase deployments, and take its integration tech into […]
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 […]
