The drone dollars keep on coming. Yesterday, California-based drone hotshot Skydio announced a $110M Series F, boosting its valuation from $2.5B after its 2024 Series E extension to an eye-watering $4.4B. The raise comes exactly a month after the company snagged a $52M US Army contract for 2,500 of its X10D small-UAS—the largest sUAS order […]
Looks like the big dogs are finally realizing that a lot of the tech they need might very well be sitting right here in startup land. Yesterday, up-and-coming defense company Lockheed Martin announced a $25M investment into Utah-based counter-drone startup Fortem Technologies, a sum that represents, according to the prime, “the initial tranche of Fortem’s […]
Overland AI’s souped-up autonomous ATV, ULTRA, has been a hit with the Army, but the Marine Corps is, quite literally, thinking bigger. The Seattle-based ground autonomy startup announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic today that it’s on contract with the Marines to integrate its OverDrive autonomy stack on the Corps’ ROGUE Fires prototype vehicle—and […]
Valinor launched last year with a focus on building the unsexy but critically important tech for modern conflict, and that pitch is starting to pay off. This morning, the new-age defense tech holding company announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic that it secured a Marine Corps contract for Harbor, its modern, mobile, and software-centric […]
Tag, you’re it! In an exclusive release in Tectonic this morning, big-time prime KBR announced that it’s tapped Tagup’s AI-powered defense logistics software to bring some startup spice to its “global logistics mission sets,” starting off with ground equipment maintenance and logistics planning operations. In 2026, the unsexy side of defense is turning out to […]
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 […]
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 […]
Looks like the old school is teaming up with the new kids on the block. Today, in an exclusive release to Tectonic, Austin-based new-age mini-missile startup Aeon announced that they’ve officially partnered with defense tech OG Global Technical Systems (GTS) to cook up new warhead designs for Aeon’s Zeus system and co-produce GTS’s low-cost cruise […]
The Europeans are really having quite the week over here in defense tech land. Earlier this week, autonomy hotshot Auterion announced that it’s won a contract from the German government to provide “thousands of mid-range, heavy AI-guided autonomous strike systems” built with Ukrainian drone company Airlogix to the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The systems—specifically, Airlogix’s X […]
We told y’all the Europeans were coming. Yesterday, German drone (but, importantly, not strike drone) giant Quantum Systems announced that it’s scored a $15.3M contract for its Vector AI drones with the US Army to deliver “advanced aerial intelligence capabilities to Brigade Combat Teams of the U.S. Army.” This marks the company’s first major Pentagon […]
