Latest Stories
Exclusive: Volund Manufacturing Raises $12M Seed
Component manufacturing really is so hot right now. This morning, new-age manufacturing startup Volund Manufacturing announced that it’s raised a $12M seed round led by Root Ventures and Squadra to build low-cost gas turbine engines. New investor Output Capital also participated in the round, and Marlinspike and First In returned to the cap table. Volund […]
Applied Aerospace & Defense Goes Public
Turns out that a whole lot of global instability is blowing the IPO window wide open for defense companies. Applied Aerospace & Defense—a Huntsville, Alabama-based, PE-backed defense and space subsystem manufacturer—went public on the New York Stock Exchange yesterday, raising $650M in its IPO and valuing the company at $3.25B after pricing shares near the […]
Motor-Maker Westmag Emerges From Stealth
We write about drones, self-guided missiles, robots, and all of the other tech taking over the battlefield of the future every day. What we write about less are the overlooked-but-critical subcomponents inside each of them. Ya know, the stuff that actually makes them work. A big part of that is because there aren’t a whole […]
Shifters Raises $10.2M Seed for Ground Robots
Big week for robotics around here, huh? This morning, US-Israeli robotics startup Shifters announced that it’s raised a $10.2M seed round led by Ace Capital Partners, bringing total funding to $15M. Other participants in the round include Aurelius Capital Management, Corner Ventures, and Arkin Capital. The company says the money will accelerate the development 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 […]
