Latest Stories
Skyryse Raises $300M Series C
If anyone was hoping that 2026 was going to be a bit chiller in defense tech land than 2025, well, shit luck for you. Yesterday, flight autonomy company Skyryse announced that it’s raised a whopping $300M Series C, bringing its valuation to $1.15B. (Unicorn status, baby!) The round was led by Autopilot Ventures and Fidelity […]
Picogrid Snags $9.3M Air Force Contract
If you hadn’t noticed, there’s a whole lot of new defense tech coming onto the scene, and, as it turns out, the Pentagon is pretty interested in making sure all of it works together. That’s been good news for Picogrid. Yesterday, the El Segundo-based integration startup announced a $9.3M contract with the Air Force to […]
Overland AI Raises $100M
Last week, we said that Overland AI keeps notching wins, and they just keep coming. Yesterday, the Seattle-based ground autonomy startup announced a fresh $100M funding round led by 8VC, which the company says will help boost production of its autonomous ground vehicles. The new round brings Overland’s total funding to $142M. Remember what we […]
Exclusive: HII Places Second Order with Nikon SLM Solutions
Told you it was a big day for the backend side of defense. This morning, Nikon SLM Solutions—a unit of Nikon Advanced Manufacturing—announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic that shipbuilding giant HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding (NNS) division has placed a second order for its NXG 600E metal additive manufacturing system. Hamid Zarringhalam, CEO of […]
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 […]
