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Exclusive: Mara Raises $7M Pre-Seed for Mass-Deployable Interceptors
The pre-seed round led by Khosla Ventures funds the development of Spike, Mara's portable full-stack counter-drone system.
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Recent Stories
Exclusive: Maglut Heavy Industries Emerges from Stealth
If you thought you’d heard the last of the new-age rare earths processing startups, think again. This morning, a new California-based startup called Maglut Heavy Industries emerged from stealth with $3.1M in pre-seed funding and a goal of developing a “chromatography-based platform to process and refine rare earth elements domestically” in the US. (We’ll get […]
Auriga Unveils Hermes for cUAS With Successful Open-Air Test
If you thought that SRMs and propellant were the only way to launch stuff into the air, well, think again. This morning, new-age launch company Auriga Space unveiled its new containerized Hermes electromagnetic launcher for drone interception and announced that they’ve already completed open-air testing of the system in the Mojave Desert. Basically, as we […]
Ursa Major to Go Public via $2.3B SPAC Deal
If 2024 was hot girl summer and 2025 was BRAT summer, then 2026 may well be the summer of the defense tech IPO. (Yes, these all exist in the same cultural reference ecosystem, what are you talking about?) This morning, hypersonics and SRM giant Ursa Major announced that it plans to go public via SPAC […]
The Pod
Valley of Depth is a podcast about the technologies that matter – and the people building them.
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Big Conversations
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 […]