Even with a whole lot of B-2 and F-47 news this year, the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) race might’ve defined the year for the Air Force. And guess what? It’s not over yet. Last Friday, the Air Force tapped nine vendors for the next stage, or Increment 2, of the CCA program, according to Breaking […]
It was only a matter of time before the Gundo Bros linked up. Yesterday, El Segundo, CA-based integration startup Picogrid and electronic warfare company CX2 announced that they teamed up to make CX2’s RF detection tech play nice with radars and other sensors at the Army XVIII Airborne Corps’ Scarlet Dragon exercise at Fort Bragg […]
The NGC2 race is on—and Rune is tagging in. This morning, the IQT-backed sustainment software startup announced that Lockheed Martin has tapped them to bring a little bit of their contested logistics magic to the prime’s NGC2 prototype OTA contract, awarded in September. Clean slate: As a refresher, the Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) […]
Well, our friends in Munich are having quite the week. This morning—hot on the heels of announcing a joint venture with Frontline Robotics, and two weeks after raising a cool €180M—German drone giant Quantum Systems announced that it’s acquired ground autonomy company FERNRIDE. QS says that this “[expands] its leadership position from air and software […]
The defense tech pond-hopping is continuing in full force. On Tuesday, Virginia-based eVTOL, drone, and avionics holding company AIRO announced that their Phoenix, Arizona, facility has pumped out the first US-made batch of their Danish subsidiary’s flagship Group 1 ISR drone, the RQ-35 Heidrun. On a roll: Founded back in 2005, AIRO has rolled up […]
In case you hadn’t noticed, two things have really defined the modern battlespace: Cameras are pretty much everywhere, and GPS navigation could be going the way of the sextant. On Tuesday, Vantor and Niantic Spatial announced they’re teaming up to build a unified visual positioning system (VPS) that combines Vantor’s aerial intelligence with Niantic’s ground-based […]
It’s been a big year for unmanned surface vessels (USVs), and maritime darling HavocAI might’ve found a new way to make them even more popular. On Monday, in an exclusive to Tectonic, the Rhode Island–based sea-drone maker and The Spaceport Company, a sea-based rocket launch startup, announced a successful suborbital rocket test launch in the […]
Nothing gets the blood—and innovation—pumping like a little bit of healthy competition to round out the year. On Wednesday, NATO DIANA, the alliance’s defense tech accelerator, announced the 150 startups from across 24 member states that made the cut for its 2026 Challenge Program, and it was a particularly intense one. Making the call: Each […]
If we learned one thing from China’s response to President Trump’s tariffs in April, it’s that the US is still deeply reliant on its biggest rival for those ever-important rare earths. That’s especially true for the ones that make all of our military kit go boom and zoom. Luckily, startup Niron Magnetics has come up […]
Voyager ($VOYG) is best known for its work in space, but the Air Force wants to bring it closer to Earth. On Wednesday, the publicly traded space company announced a $21M contract with the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) to develop AI-powered intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) systems that “scale seamlessly from tactical small Unmanned […]
