Latest Stories
Harmattan Scores 5,000-Drone Follow-On Order from France
Just because Eurosatory is over certainly doesn’t mean our friends across the pond are slowing things down. Yesterday, French autonomy startup Harmattan AI announced that the French government has ordered another 5,000 of its Sonora ISR drones, just a year after ordering a first tranche of 1,000. That first batch—part of a program of record […]
STARK Raises €500M at €3.5B Valuation
If you think the defense tech scene is hot in the US, take a look across the pond. Yesterday, German drone startup STARK quietly announced a very chill €500M ($567M) fundraising round led by longtime (in defense startup terms) backers Founders Fund and Sequoia Capital. The two-year-old company told Tectonic that the round put its […]
Booz Allen Buys Ultra I&C Mission Solutions for $720M
Well, gosh darn. Booz Allen ($BAH) is really doubling down on the whole defense tech thing. Yesterday, the government services giant announced that it’s acquiring Ultra I&C Mission Solutions—part of the Cobham Ultra Group—for a cool $720M. When the deal closes (expected by the end of September 2026), Ultra Mission Solutions will become a fully […]
Anduril Tapped to Lead NGC2 Common Data Baseline
Hasn’t been a slow year (or week) for Anduril, to say the least, and it’s about to get a whole lot busier. Yesterday, the US Army announced that it’s selected everyone’s favorite neoprime to lead the common data baseline for its Next-Generation Command and Control (NGC2) effort, tasking the company with making sure all 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 […]
