Latest Stories
Vantor Snags $217M-Ceiling Army Contract
Things keep getting busier and busier in Vantor-land. On the heels of a deal to integrate with Google’s high-powered Earth AI model, the geospatial intelligence heavyweight announced a big ol’ follow-on contract with the US Army worth up to $217M to continue work on the service’s One World Terrain program, designed to “train and rehearse […]
Firehawk and UNION Team Up
Welp, everyone really be out here just forming cliques. Yesterday, 3D-printed propellant hotshot (get it) Firehawk announced that it’s teaming up with manufacturing startup UNION to “[bring] together UNION’s software-defined factory platform and metal parts manufacturing with Firehawk’s advanced energetics and propulsion manufacturing platform.” In particular, the two companies say they’re banding together to work […]
Exclusive: NODA AI Raises $25M Bessemer-led Series A at $125M Valuation
If you’re a regular Tectonic reader, you’ll know there are a whole lot of drones, drone boats, drone submarines, and whatever other autonomous thingamajigs you can think of coming onto the market. What all these autonomous systems are missing is a playcaller that turns them into a cohesive multi-domain, multi-platform force. NODA AI is building […]
TYTAN Raises €30M Series A
Well, we’re running with a bit of a theme today. Can someone let us know why everyone is raising pretty much the exact same amount of money on the exact same day? Yesterday, German interceptor hotshot TYTAN announced that it’s raised a €30M Series A led by Armira and NATO Innovation Fund (NIF), with support […]
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 […]
