Latest Stories
AV Unveils Mayhem 10 Launched Effects
The brains behind the ever-popular Switchblade 600 loitering munition are back with some fancy new go-boom tech. This morning, AV ($AVAV), the artist formerly known as AeroVironment, unveiled the Mayhem 10, an air, ground, or sea-launched autonomous Group 2 drone designed for ISR, electronic warfare, and (especially) precision-strike missions. Go boom: AV’s Switchblade family of […]
Lockheed Martin Ventures Boosts Fund to $1B
Turns out an old dog can, in fact, learn new tricks. Yesterday, mom-and-pop shop Lockheed Martin announced that it’s boosting its venture fund (aptly named Lockheed Martin Ventures) from $400M to a cool $1B, marking “the largest boost in investment since the fund was established in 2007.” The prime says it will use the funds […]
Nominal Inks $53M Deal with the Air Force Test Center
The data nerds over at Nominal are on a bit of a heater. Yesterday, the testing startup announced a sole-source $53M, five-year Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract with the Air Force Test Center to bring its increasingly popular testing software to help get the service’s next-gen platforms up and running—and fast. Those platforms include the […]
Exclusive: Striveworks Scores $70M Pentagon-wide EA
Well, it looks like the Pentagon might finally be well and truly getting on the AI bandwagon. This morning, AI-for-defense startup Striveworks announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic that they’ve scored a $70M multi-year enterprise agreement (EA) with the DoD (through the US Army) to deploy their flagship Chariot Core software across the Department. […]
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 […]
