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, […]
Well, jeez. We thought Quantum Systems was already having quite the year—turns out we didn’t know the half of it. This morning, the German autonomy giant announced that it’s raised a $1.2B Series D at a $8B valuation, co-led by Blackstone, Noteus, Airbus, and Advent. The company says it will use the money to “accelerate […]
If there is one thing you take away from today’s newsletter, let it be this: Everyone and their mother is still pouring oodles (and then some more oodles) of money into defense. Yesterday, SF-based Cantos Ventures announced it closed a $70M Fund IV earlier this year, which Founder & GP Ian Rountree told Tectonic that […]
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 […]
The Canadians are really making some serious money moves in defense, eh? This morning, Canadian defense tech darling Dominion Dynamics announced that it’s raised a CA$139M (US$100M) Series A led by Georgian (Canada’s largest VC). Dominion founder and CEO Eliot Pence told Tectonic that the company will use the money to scale up production of […]
Is it just us, or is the stuff we’re covering (looking at you, haptic controllers) getting more and more niche? This morning, Australian aerospace tech company MAKO (formerly known as MicroTau) announced that it’s raised AU$28M (US$20M) to scale up production of its—wait for it—“drag-reducing shark skin-inspired adhesive film for aviation,” known as Flightfilm. The […]
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) […]
Making your first acquisition is a big moment in any startup’s life, and Code Metal is speedrunning it. Yesterday, Code Metal announced that they’ve snapped up Signal Processing Technologies (SPT), a move that takes the three-year-old startup from simply translating high-level code and algorithms onto hardware systems into actually developing the algorithms themselves, starting with […]
Frying them with microwaves, shooting them down with robo-machine guns, jamming them—counter-UAS companies keep rolling out a growing and creative array of ways to take down drones. Askari has a different take on it. Rather than building vehicle-based or fixed-site air defense systems, the Atlanta-based startup wants to—quite literally—put interceptors into the hands of frontline […]
If you think the defense tech scene is hot in the US, take a look across the pond. Yesterday, German drone startup STARK quietly announced a very chill €500M ($567M) fundraising round led by longtime (in defense startup terms) backers Founders Fund and Sequoia Capital. The two-year-old company told Tectonic that the round put its […]
