Latest Stories
Say Hello to Lancea.AI
Guess the AI bubble for defense hasn’t popped quite yet. This week, a new company (well, Public Benefit Corporation) called Lancea.AI emerged from stealth, promising to use AI to drive effective strategic communication—especially in high-pressure situations, like intelligence and national security. According to Lancea co-founder Greg Young, the company’s software is built for “adaptive influence.” […]
Lockheed Recruits Rune for its NGC2 Prototype
The NGC2 race is on—and Rune is tagging in. This morning, the IQT-backed sustainment software startup announced that Lockheed Martin has tapped them to bring a little bit of their contested logistics magic to the prime’s NGC2 prototype OTA contract, awarded in September. Clean slate: As a refresher, the Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) […]
Quantum Systems Snaps Up FERNRIDE
Well, our friends in Munich are having quite the week. This morning—hot on the heels of announcing a joint venture with Frontline Robotics, and two weeks after raising a cool €180M—German drone giant Quantum Systems announced that it’s acquired ground autonomy company FERNRIDE. QS says that this “[expands] its leadership position from air and software […]
AIRO Produces Its First Fully American-Made ISR Drones
The defense tech pond-hopping is continuing in full force. On Tuesday, Virginia-based eVTOL, drone, and avionics holding company AIRO announced that their Phoenix, Arizona, facility has pumped out the first US-made batch of their Danish subsidiary’s flagship Group 1 ISR drone, the RQ-35 Heidrun. On a roll: Founded back in 2005, AIRO has rolled up […]
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 […]
A Q+A with Arthur Herman and John Burer
If you’ve been in DC anytime in the past few years, you will have heard of Arthur Herman. In case you’re unfamiliar (nerd!), he wrote Freedom’s Forge back in 2012, which has shaped a lot of the First Breakfast-type reindustrialization conversations we’ve been having lately. Sparknotes: The book (if you haven’t read it or have […]
