If you read Tectonic, you’ll probably be aware of two things: Hypersonic weapons are in high demand these days, and the government wants to move fast to field them. Like, really fast. That’s all well and good, but one super-underappreciated part of that story is that testing these systems—especially the unsexy stuff like coatings, ceramic […]
Looks like no one’s found the shut-off valve on the defense tech funding tap yet. Yesterday, San Diego-based early-stage VC firm Harpoon Ventures—an investor in startups ranging from Firestorm to Ursa Major and Merlin—announced that it’s closed a $155M Fund IV to, in the words of Harpoon investor Riley Loftus, back the “maniacs that are […]
Looks like the clankers (robots, for the non-internet people among us) are here to stay. Yesterday, ground autonomy startup Overland AI announced that they’ve been awarded a $20M production contract through the APFIT program to deliver autonomous ground vehicles for the Marine Corps Marine Air Defense Integrated System (MADIS). For the uninitiated, that’s the Corps’ […]
As we all know, there’s a whole lot of private capital going into defense these days, but more and more companies are jumping on the growing appetite in the public markets, too. On Friday, California-based heavy-lift drone startup Elroy Air announced plans to go public later this year through a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) […]
Making your first acquisition is a big moment in any startup’s life, and Code Metal is speedrunning it. Yesterday, Code Metal announced that they’ve snapped up Signal Processing Technologies (SPT), a move that takes the three-year-old startup from simply translating high-level code and algorithms onto hardware systems into actually developing the algorithms themselves, starting with […]
Frying them with microwaves, shooting them down with robo-machine guns, jamming them—counter-UAS companies keep rolling out a growing and creative array of ways to take down drones. Askari has a different take on it. Rather than building vehicle-based or fixed-site air defense systems, the Atlanta-based startup wants to—quite literally—put interceptors into the hands of frontline […]
If you think the defense tech scene is hot in the US, take a look across the pond. Yesterday, German drone startup STARK quietly announced a very chill €500M ($567M) fundraising round led by longtime (in defense startup terms) backers Founders Fund and Sequoia Capital. The two-year-old company told Tectonic that the round put its […]
Hasn’t been a slow year (or week) for Anduril, to say the least, and it’s about to get a whole lot busier. Yesterday, the US Army announced that it’s selected everyone’s favorite neoprime to lead the common data baseline for its Next-Generation Command and Control (NGC2) effort, tasking the company with making sure all of […]
Last year, Palmer Luckey said that he believes “the subterranean domain”—rather than sea, air, or space—“will be the defining [warfighting] space, but nobody agrees with me, and every time I talk about it I sound insane to people.” He also said that “a vehicle that moves through the crust of the earth is going to […]
Ondas had quite the week at Eurosatory. At the defense expo in Paris, the US-based autonomous systems roll-up company unveiled a slew of new tech under its “Autonomy at First Contact” vision, including a ground robot, an autonomous defense orchestration system, and a couple of new counter-drone systems. In that broader announcement, Ondas hinted that […]
