It’s been a busy, beefy week for the Pentagon and a certain AI giant, but a startup out of El Segundo has a solution to those tensions: Just build an AI lab purpose-built for national security. And investors are on board. Yesterday, Smack Technologies announced a combo Seed and Series A round to build what […]
If you thought the unmanned surface vessel world couldn’t get any busier, well, think again. This morning, Belgian maritime autonomy startup MAHI unveiled a 27-foot high-speed USV called the Alpha-8, designed as a demonstration vessel for its autonomy stack in exercises and training with the Belgian Navy, at least to start. Fishy business: MAHI, in […]
The hype for hypersonics keeps getting more real. Yesterday, the Pentagon announced that mass-producible hypersonic missile hotshot Castelion was awarded a $50M contract with the US Navy for the “full-scale prototypes, flight testing, and operational fielding” of its Blackbeard missile, which COO Sean Pitt told Tectonic will be an air-launched variant. The Los Angeles-based startup […]
Things keep getting busier and busier in Vantor-land. On the heels of a deal to integrate with Google’s high-powered Earth AI model, the geospatial intelligence heavyweight announced a big ol’ follow-on contract with the US Army worth up to $217M to continue work on the service’s One World Terrain program, designed to “train and rehearse […]
If you’re a regular Tectonic reader, you’ll know there are a whole lot of drones, drone boats, drone submarines, and whatever other autonomous thingamajigs you can think of coming onto the market. What all these autonomous systems are missing is a playcaller that turns them into a cohesive multi-domain, multi-platform force. NODA AI is building […]
If there’s one thing sharing a border with Russia has taught the Baltics in the past few years, it’s that drone defense is pretty damn important. Luckily, a crop of high-octane startups is rushing to meet the moment, and securing some serious cash to get there. Yesterday, Estonian interceptor startup Frankenburg Technologies announced a €30M […]
Anduril sure has a knack for making friends. Yesterday, defense and transportation-focused startup Shift5 announced that they’re joining Anduril’s Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) prototyping effort to bring its predictive maintenance magic to the Army’s 4th Infantry Division’s vehicles. Race to integrate: We’ve covered the Army’s NGC2 program a lot, so we’ll keep it […]
Defense tech isn’t all drone swarms and software. Sometimes the basic stuff is the most important. Today, in an exclusive release to Tectonic, Texas-based energetic material startup Critical Materials Group (CMG) emerged from stealth to solve an old problem with new tech: Making more of the stuff that makes things go boom, starting with C-4, […]
Quantum Systems is officially entering the ground autonomy game, baby. Earlier today, German autonomy hotshot Quantum Systems introduced MANDRILL, its first unmanned ground vehicle (UGV), at the Enforce Tac trade show in Nuremberg. The $3.5B startup, better known for its aerial drones, called it the first in a line of UGVs designed to work with […]
Looks like someone wants to unleash drone dominance. Yesterday, the FPV phenoms from El Segundo turned things up a notch big-time with Project Millennium: A new 250,000-square-foot factory down the road in Torrance, CA, where they’ll ramp up production of their Archer drones to a million a year. If you were wondering what they were […]
