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JIATF-401 Rolls Out Amazon-Style Counter-Drone Marketplace
You can buy pretty much anything on Amazon, but military equipment is (so far) off-limits. Luckily for all of the shopaholic soldiers out there, the Pentagon’s JIATF-401 counter-drone task force is taking a page out of Amazon’s book and building Prime for the primes (and startups). Today, they officially unveiled an online marketplace for companies […]
Valar Atomics Raises $1B Series B Led by Sequoia
The nuclear startup world is going, well, nuclear. Yesterday, El Segundo-based Valar Atomics announced a whopping $1B Series B led by Sequoia Capital. The raise comes hot on the heels of the three-year-old startup’s microreactor hitting criticality (when a nuclear chain reaction becomes self-sustaining) in the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program, a partnership with […]
Army Taps Rheinmetall-led Team for Sustainment UGVs
Looks like the Army’s keeping its foot on the gas in its push for more ground autonomy. On Friday, American Rheinmetall announced that it’s snagged a contract to serve as the prime integrator for a team of companies—Harbinger, Forterra, and Primordial Labs—that will develop autonomous logistics ground vehicles for the Army’s Project Sustainment initiative. Ghost […]
The Pod
Valley of Depth is a podcast about the technologies that matter – and the people building them.
Investment
Tech
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 […]