Latest Stories
Reliable Robotics Raises $160M
Welp, the cash money just keeps on flowing. Yesterday, aviation autonomy company Reliable Robotics announced that it’s raised a cool, cool $160M to “accelerate deployment and scale production of the Reliable Autonomy System (RAS).” That’s their flight autonomy stack that basically takes any plane and makes it a drone. The round was led by Nimble […]
Exclusive: The Marines Snap Up Valinor’s Hospital-in-a-Box
Valinor launched last year with a focus on building the unsexy but critically important tech for modern conflict, and that pitch is starting to pay off. This morning, the new-age defense tech holding company announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic that it secured a Marine Corps contract for Harbor, its modern, mobile, and software-centric […]
Kraken and Anduril Team Up
Our drone boat friends over in Fareham are certainly having quite the week. Yesterday, everyone’s favorite new age defense company (Anduril) announced that it’s teaming up with UK-founded Kraken Technology Group to bring the company’s “proven family of small, high-performance, mass-producible USVs” to the US. The announcement comes just a day after Rheinmetall—that tiny German […]
Shield AI Tapped for COCO ISR
Our friends over at Shield AI are having quite the start to the year. Yesterday, the San Diego-based autonomy giant announced that it’s been tapped by the US Navy to compete for $800M in ISR services with its VTOL V-BAT drone. AV—FKA AeroVironment—also announced that it had been selected to compete for the contractor-owned, contractor-operated […]
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 […]
