Latest Stories
ICYMI: Stark Snaps Up AeroMass Technologies
If anyone thinks M&A isn’t the road to success, someone better tell the defense tech world—and fast. Earlier this week, European defense tech darling STARK announced that it has acquired AeroMass Technologies, a “distributed manufacturing company” that says it builds “scalable, attritable systems for the modern battlefield.” The move comes just a few months after […]
Croatia’s Orqa FPV Scales Annual Production to 280,000 Drones
When you think of European defense tech hotspots, Croatia probably isn’t the first country that comes to mind—but maybe it should. Earlier this week, Orqa FPV announced that it has boosted its annual production capacity to 280,000 NDAA-compliant, Chinese-component-free FPV drones at its headquarters in Osijek, Croatia. That big bump, CEO Srdjan Kovacevic told Tectonic, […]
The Pentagon’s Pricey Wish List
If you’ve been tracking some numbers coming out of the Pentagon recently, you’ll have seen a whole lot of zeroes. Earlier this week, the Department of Defense/War (take your pick, we don’t judge) dropped a whopping $150B solicitation for the Missile Defense Agency’s Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense (SHIELD) program, tapping over 1,000 “qualifying […]
Saronic Invests $300M in Louisiana Shipyard
Saronic is making a big splash down south. On Wednesday, the autonomous surface vessel (ASV) heavyweight announced it’s making a $300M investment in its Franklin, Louisiana, shipyard, a move the company says will speed up its delivery of those robo-ships the Navy so desperately wants. Future fleet, here we come. Splashing around: Saronic has a […]
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 […]
A Q+A with Arthur Herman and John Burer
If you’ve been in DC anytime in the past few years, you will have heard of Arthur Herman. In case you’re unfamiliar (nerd!), he wrote Freedom’s Forge back in 2012, which has shaped a lot of the First Breakfast-type reindustrialization conversations we’ve been having lately. Sparknotes: The book (if you haven’t read it or have […]
A Q+A with Enrique Oti, CSO at Second Front Systems
Personally, we would give a lot to be a fly on the wall in the early days of the Defense Innovation Unit (RIP Unit X). Luckily, we know a guy who was there. Enrique Oti—apparently referred to intermittently as “Software Jesus of the Air Force”—was one of the co-founders of DIU, and for much of […]
