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Neros Plans Production Scale and New Products After $250M Raise
When we said that “a certain El Segundo-based company is doing very well on the whole Drone Dominance
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Archer Acquires Three Boeing Autonomous Flight Subsidiaries
Here we were thinking that defense tech’s exit era would look like giant primes buying up smaller startups. Turns out we were wrong—at least for now. Yesterday, electric aviation hotshot (and Anduril BFF) Archer Aviation announced that it would acquire three of Boeing’s autonomous flight subsidiaries—Wisk, SkyGrid and Insitu—giving the prime a 20 percent stake […]
Epirus Scores $11M Contract with USMC
Everyone really is on the non-kinetic-weapon hype train right now, aren’t they? This morning, high-powered-microwave (HPM) giant Epirus announced that they’ve been awarded an $11M contract by the US Marine Corps for the High-power Microwave Autonomous Vehicle Operational Capability (HAVOC) program. Under the contract, Epirus will deliver “its latest high-power microwave (HPM) system for counter-UAS […]
Exclusive: Swarm Aero Wins $10M Air Force Research Lab Contract
When you think of a drone swarm, a cloud of speedy little quadcopters flying in unison probably comes to mind. Swarm Aero has a different vision. The California-based startup is building a much larger, Reaper-sized Group 5 drone, designed to be mass-manufacturable and capable of operating in a swarm using its own in-house autonomy and […]
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 […]