Latest Stories
Exclusive: Accelint Sets Out on Long-Haul Voyage for OUSW R&E
If you thought the unmanned surface vessel world couldn’t get any more crowded, well, think again. This morning, Accelint announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic that its new MV-20 surface vessel has set out on a 600+ mile-long long-endurance mission in the Gulf of Mexico to prove “endurance, navigation, and integrated payload performance under […]
Divergent and Mach Industries Team Up
Watch out, world: The LA boys are teaming up. Yesterday, Mach Industries and new-age manufacturing giant Divergent announced that they’ve teamed up to build a drone called Venom, a “prototype flight demonstration aircraft showing hardware development at software speed,” according to a statement put out by the two companies. And they’re not messing around when […]
Aussie Autonomy Startup Breaker Raises $6M Seed Round
In case you missed 8VC and Lux Capital throwing their weight behind Nigeria’s Terra Industries this week, the big ballers of American defense tech VC have been casting their eyes abroad lately. And now, they’re looking at the land down under. Earlier this week, Breaker—an Australian-American startup building AI voice-control software for autonomous swarms—raised $6M […]
Seasats Aims to Boost USV Production after $20M Series A
Laissez les bons temps rouler in maritime autonomy world. Yesterday, California-based USV startup Seasats announced that it closed a $20M Series A led by Konvoy Ventures, with participation from Shield Capital, Techstars, and others. That fresh capital brings their total funding to over $40M, and as CEO Mike Flanigan told Tectonic, it’s all about scaling […]
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 […]
