Latest Stories
Auterion and MGI Engineering Team Up on TigerShark
Well, these certainly ain’t your granny’s quadcopter drones. Yesterday, autonomy and swarming software hotshot Auterion announced that it has teamed up with UK-based MGI Engineering—a, well, engineering firm—to successfully fly a cruise missile-like drone called TigerShark in the UK. According to the two companies, TigerShark can: MGI and Auterion say this is “the first time […]
UNION and X-Bow Team Up on Energetics Production
The folks building the factories of the future are certainly having a moment right now. Yesterday, software-defined manufacturing startup UNION and solid rocket motor-maker X-Bow Systems (pronounced crossbow, btw) teamed up to build “surge-capable” propulsion system production capacity, which X-Bow CGO Maureen Gannon told Tectonic is a “direct response” to the AFRL’s “Endless Forge” initiative. […]
Applied Intuition Unveils Mobile Autonomy Testing Unit
We’ve heard of forward-deployed engineers and manufacturing, but now Applied Intuition wants to make autonomy testing mobile. Earlier this week, autonomy giant Applied Intuition rolled out Edge, a “mobile operations center” designed to facilitate the development, testing, and operation of autonomous systems at, well, the edge. Sim-er down: We’ve covered Applied Intuition before, but as […]
PE OceanSound Closes $3.4B Fund III
You know an industry is blowing up when the private equity (PE) guys are coming for it. Yesterday, New York and Florida-based PE fund OceanSound Partners closed a $3.4B Fund II to invest in “technology and technology-enabled services companies serving aerospace, defense, government and highly regulated enterprise end markets.” The oversubscribed fund (goal was $2B) […]
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 […]
