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Erik Prince Launches “Air Defense As a Service” Startup With Swarmer
Ukrainian-born, Austin-based swarming software company Swarmer has a 20 percent stake in the company.
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Sensing Roll-Up Lyntris Goes Public on the NYSE
Turns out that a whole lot of global instability is blowing the IPO window wide open for defense companies, and Lyntris is striking while the iron’s hot. The private-equity-backed, Virginia-based defense sensing software and hardware company went public on the NYSE yesterday, raising roughly $300M in a downsized IPO and joining a string of defense […]
Elroy Air Wins $46M Army Contract
Well, sounds like at least one service is getting serious about the whole distributed and contested logistics side of things. Yesterday, heavy-lift drone company Elroy Air announced that it’s won a $46M multi-year contract with the US Army for “the development of an autonomous hybrid-electric vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) uncrewed aircraft system for modular […]
The Pod
Valley of Depth is a podcast about the technologies that matter – and the people building them.
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Big Conversations
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 […]