Most people wouldn’t get too excited about the release of a thousand-page bill draft. But for the defense tech world, there’s a lot to smile about in the Chairman’s Mark of the FY26 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). For those lucky enough not to spend a lot of time on Capitol Hill: The Chairman’s Mark […]
Turns out the threat from Iran extends to the defense industry, too. Last week, buried somewhere in the 2025 news cycle, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency put out a joint statement with the DoD’s Cyber Crime Center (DC3), NSA, and FBI warning that US defense companies face heightened risk from Iranian cyberattacks. The statement […]
Looks like Rise8 is, well, on the rise. Earlier today, the Tampa-based software delivery startup announced that it won a contract with the US Space Force’s Future Operationally Resilient Ground Evolution (FORGE) program to provide continuous software delivery capabilities. In layman’s terms, that means the company will help build out the software pipeline that helps […]
In case you haven’t read the news lately, President Trump has faced a bit of an uphill battle securing peace deals in Ukraine and Gaza. But he has had success in an unlikely place: the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Last week, Rwanda and the Congo—bad history there, we’ll get into that—signed a deal under […]
Aid paused (again): After meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at last week’s NATO summit in The Hague, President Donald Trump was pretty gung-ho on Kyiv. When asked about whether the country would receive more desperately-needed Patriots, he said they “want to have the anti-missile missiles, as they call them, and we’re going to see if […]
Cash-telion: The hype for hypersonics is real. In its FY26 budget, the Army is requesting $25M to develop “Blackbeard” hypersonic missiles made by Castelion—just five months after the California-based missile startup raised $100M in a Series A funding round. Talk about a hot launch. Origin story: Castelion was founded in 2022 by three SpaceX alums—Bryon […]
As the saying goes, there are some weeks where decades happen. Between intel leaks at home, the NATO summit in The Hague, and a rather unorthodox ceasefire in Iran, last week was (another) one of those in the defense world. And then came the kicker: On Thursday, the Pentagon unveiled its FY26 budget request. Like, […]
By this point, we all get the gist of what happened last weekend. Super-early Sunday morning Tehran time, US B-2 stealth bombers flew 37 hours nonstop from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to Iran and back, dropping more than a dozen 30,000-pound “bunker buster” GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs) on three Iranian nuclear enrichment […]
Young money: Last Wednesday, California-based defense start-up Mach Industries made a hell of an announcement: they raised a $100M Series B led by Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures at a $470M valuation. Impressive stuff, but even more impressive when you consider that the company was founded just two years ago by Ethan Thornton, a now-21-year-old […]
In a week that has seen some big investments in defense tech (looking at you, Applied Intuition), we’ve got yet another heavy hitter: German AI and drone company Helsing announced Tuesday that they’ve raised $691M in a Series D funding round, valuing it at nearly $14B. Did we mention that it’s only Tuesday?
