Latest Stories
Saildrone Unveils Spectre, Built with Lockheed Martin
By the look of things, it’s going to be a busy, busy week out in National Harbor. This morning, USV darling Saildrone announced at Sea-Air-Space that they’re building a new, 52-meter (170-foot) USV called Spectre, the “largest, fastest, and most capable Saildrone platform to date,” according to the company. The big ol’ drone boat is […]
Exclusive: Tocaro Blue Unveils ApolloCore
It’s Sea Air Space week, baby, and the news is already coming in hot and fast. This morning, maritime perception company Tocaro Blue (you’ll remember them from their team-up with Havoc AI) unveiled ApolloCore, a new camera-based machine learning software, in an exclusive release to Tectonic. The stack—designed to work with the company’s ProteusCore radar […]
Beacon AI Snags $50M USSOCOM Aviation AI Contract
After a long line of (relatively) smaller contracts, Beacon’s finally getting the big bucks. Last week, California-based aviation AI startup inked a $50M multi-year deal—their 13th, and largest, to date—with US Special Operations Command that’ll put its pilot-assistance software in the cockpits of a wide range of SOCOM’s aircraft. Under the contract—a four-year Prototype Other […]
Exclusive: Terra Industries Opens Africa’s Largest Drone Factory in Ghana
Africa might not come to mind as a defense tech hotspot, but Terra Industries is changing that—quickly. In an exclusive announcement to Tectonic this morning, 8VC and Lux Capital-backed Nigerian drone startup Terra Industries unveiled its new 34,000-square-foot factory in Accra, Ghana, called Pax-2. The facility will be the company’s first outside Nigeria and, with […]
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 […]
