The engine biz is getting buzzy. Earlier this week, Beehive Industries, a Colorado-based startup making 3D-printed engines for munitions and unmanned aerial systems (UAS), announced that its Frenzy engine has completed high-altitude testing and is ready for integration onto an aerial vehicle for flight tests starting early next year. In a frenzy: Founded in 2020, […]
Shipbuilding is so back, baby. Less than a week after announcing a whopping $300M investment in its Louisiana shipyard, Texas-based autonomous shipbuilder Saronic revealed yesterday that it’s won a $392M Other Transaction Agreement (OTA) to supply the Navy with an undisclosed number of unmanned surface vessels. Talk about demand signal. Making a splash: The $392M […]
We can all breathe a sigh of relief. On Sunday night, Congress finally released a compromise draft of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a breezy 3,000-page bill that authorizes a record $901B in defense spending, $8B more than the White House initially requested. The must-pass bill is headed for a vote in the coming […]
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, […]
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 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 […]
‘Tis the season of team-ups, and it looks like the primes have new friends in the startup world on their Christmas list. On Tuesday, defense prime Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) and autonomy quasi-startup Applied Intuition announced they’re joining forces to introduce vehicle autonomy to SNC’s fleet of mobile c-UAS and air defense platforms. Shoot ‘em […]
Well, we’re back with more Heven AeroTech news—and man, oh man, do the drone dollars keep on comin’. On Monday, the Israeli-American hydrogen-powered drone startup announced that it’s closed a whopping $100M Series B funding round led by their new friends at IonQ, valuing the company at $1B. The Chinese Zodiac calendar officially says it’s […]
Ukraine’s path to NATO is looking shakier by the day, but that hasn’t stopped the alliance from pushing to integrate the country’s battle-tested tech into Europe’s defense tech ecosystem. Late last week, as we were all enjoying our turkey, NATO and Ukraine unveiled a new competition called “UNITE–Brave NATO,” designed to accelerate the adoption of […]
The counter-drone club just got its newest—and maybe youngest—member. In an exclusive release to Tectonic, Thermopylae, a California-based interceptor drone startup launched in June by a 21-year-old Ukrainian engineer, announced it has raised $1.6M in pre-seed funding. New kids: Drawing its name from the famous Spartan battle against the Persians immortalized in the movie “300,” […]
