Latest Stories
Navy Nixes MASC Program, Launches Medium-USV “Marketplace”
Pour one out for MASC. Yesterday, less than a year after announcing it, the US Navy cancelled the Modular Attack Surface Craft (MASC) program—originally designed as a prototyping competition to field medium unmanned surface vessels (MUSVs)—in favor of a “regular and recurring marketplace” for mid-sized drone boats. Reactions to the shift in the USV world […]
ICYMI: PDW Raises $110M Series B
In case you missed it amidst the, like, ten thousand mega-raises in the past few days, it’s been quite the week for a certain Alabama-based drone company. On Wednesday, Huntsville-based Performance Drone Works announced that it’s raised a cool $110M+ Series B led by Ondas with participation from Hood River, Cedar Pine, Hanwha Asset Management’s […]
Shield AI Raises $2B Series G at $12.7B Valuation
Well, we all saw it coming. Last month, Bloomberg reported that Shield AI was in talks to raise $1B. Turns out the autonomy startup—and investors—had a bit more money on their mind. This morning, Shield AI announced that it has raised a $2B Series G led by Advent International and JPMorgan’s Security and Resiliency Initiative, […]
Sift Raises $42M Series B
Big week for the nuts and bolts side of defense. Yesterday, Sift—an El Segundo-based startup building the data infrastructure layer for autonomous machines—announced that it’s raised a $42M Series B led by StepStone with participation from GV (Google Ventures), Riot Ventures, Fika Ventures, and CIV. The company says it’ll use the new cash money to […]
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 […]
