Valinor launched last year with a focus on building the unsexy but important tech for modern conflict that no one else is, and it doesn’t get much more picks-and-shovels-y than drone docking stations. Looks like that bet is paying off. Earlier this week, the new-age defense tech holding company Valinor announced its Dispatch product-company—a modular […]
Take a quick look around the defense startup scene, and you’ll notice that pretty much every company bills its tech as “tested in Ukraine.” Far fewer can say that they’re trusted in Ukraine. Forterra actually can. Yesterday, the ground autonomy startup revealed that it has sent over 100 Lancer autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs)—based on the […]
Lasers and partnering with Rheinmetall…so hot right now. Directed energy startup Aurelius Systems is teaming up with the German mega-prime’s American subsidiary to integrate its drone-downing laser weapon, Archimedes, onto a Rheinmetall unmanned ground vehicle, the company exclusively told Tectonic. The partnership is the first for Aurelius and, since they aren’t planning to make ground […]
You know how we say we love the unsexy side of defense? Well, we’re back with some news from the unsexiest place we can imagine—the land of the nitty gritty back office paperwork that makes the cool stuff actually happen. Luckily, one startup is on a mission to make that tedious but super important work […]
The great defense tech rollup is well underway, and Ondas ($ONDS) is quietly leading the charge. This morning, the drone and counter-drone roll-up announced that it’s acquired California-based drone company DZYNE Technologies for a whopping $875.8M, forming a new business unit with fellow Ondas portfolio company World View (acquired in April) that’ll be focused on […]
If you can believe it, today marks the halfway point of the year, and we’d be the first to tell you that it’s been a pretty wild ride in defense tech so far. As it turns out, the numbers back up our—and, if you’re reading this newsletter, your—excitement. According to Pitchbook data provided to Tectonic, […]
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) […]
