Latest Stories
Manufacturing Startup Amca Closes $300M Series B
Manufacturing is, like, hotter than hot right now. This morning, the Advanced Manufacturing Company of America, better known as Amca, raked in some serious reindustrialize-flavored cash, announcing a $300M Series B at an over $1B valuation. Caffeinated Capital led the round, with Lightspeed, a16z, Lux Capital, and Construct Capital participating. Networking: A lot of new-age […]
Mach Industries Snaps Up Rocket Motor-Maker Exquadrum
It’s not every day that a CEO buys a company older than they are, but welcome to the new age of defense tech. Yesterday, Mach Industries, founded in 2022 by now-22-year-old CEO Ethan Thornton, revealed that it acquired 24-year-old propulsion system and solid rocket motor-maker Exquadrum in a $50M deal back in April. The acquisition […]
Shield AI Tapped for LUCAS Autonomy
Well, a drone with the same name as some dude you hung out with in college is getting a buzzy upgrade. Yesterday, autonomy giant Shield AI announced that it’s been tapped by the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering (OUSW R&E) to build its Hivemind autonomy software onto LUCAS—the Low-Cost […]
Perennial Autonomy Scores $500M JIATF 401 IDIQ
Well, looks like the Pentagon is getting super-serious about c-UAS, what with everything happening in the Middle East. Late yesterday, Joint Interagency Task Force 401 (JIATF 401) announced that it’s awarded a $500M IDIQ to Perennial Autonomy—the super-secret startup reportedly launched by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt—to provide “enterprise-wide counter-unmanned aerial system operations.” The company—which […]
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 […]
