Featured
Hadrian Quintuples Valuation After $1.37B Series D
"This really enables us to do is massively expand our footprint and capabilities," CEO Chris Power said.
Tectonic in your inbox
Get daily insights on the most important news impacting defense innovation.
Recent Stories
Aurelius Raises $40M Series A for Laser Weapons
Pew, pew baby. It’s time to talk about lasers again. This morning, directed energy weapons startup Aurelius announced that it’s raised a $40M Series A to scale up production of its flagship Archimedes laser c-UAS platform. “We will use this to…expand our capacity to produce systems, build out our team, [and] build out manufacturing and […]
Mariana Minerals Raises $310M Series B
Lock in, kids. We’re playing with rocks today. Yesterday, AI-powered mining and refining company Mariana Minerals announced that it’s raised a $310M Series B led by Khosla Ventures, bringing total funding to about $400M. Mariana CEO and co-founder Turner Caldwell told Tectonic that they’ll use the funding to scale up their current mining operations—Copper One […]
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 […]
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 […]