Well, sounds like at least one service is getting serious about the whole distributed and contested logistics side of things. Yesterday, heavy-lift drone company Elroy Air announced that it’s won a $46M multi-year contract with the US Army for “the development of an autonomous hybrid-electric vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) uncrewed aircraft system for modular […]
We don’t have to tell you the interceptor shortage is very real and very dire, but much of this discussion focuses on Group 3 (i.e., Shahed-type) UAS threats. Russia and Iran certainly have used smaller, cheaper drones en masse, but a lot of the real damage—in Iran’s case—inflicted on US bases in the Middle East […]
The award comes just a few weeks after NODA won a $10M contract to develop and integrate its orchestration system with LUCAS.
Critical minerals really are so hot right now. Yesterday, AI-and-autonomy-for-critical-minerals-processing startup Riven emerged from stealth with a cool $7.9 pre-seed led by Cerberus Ventures, with participation from Scout Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Lightscape Partners, CLAI, and New System Ventures. The company says it will use the funding to majorly scale up the team and build out […]
Big day for the backend side of defense. This morning, software-for-defense hotshot Code Metal announced that it’s won a $80M OTA to “advance WarMatrix, the AI-enabled modeling and simulation platform Code Metal built in partnership with the U.S. Air Force.” “We’re really excited,” Code Metal CEO and co-founder Peter Morales told Tectonic. “The work that […]
We spend a whole lot of time around here talking about super-high-tech hardware (the go boom and zoom of it all), but we don’t spend a whole lot of time talking about how companies design that kit. That changes today. This morning, LA-based generative design startup VXB announced (exclusively to Tectonic) an upgrade to its […]
When we said that “a certain El Segundo-based company is doing very well on the whole Drone Dominance Program (DDP) front,” we might’ve undersold it—that certain company is doing very well on all fronts. Yesterday, the FPV phenoms at Neros announced that they raised $250M in a funding round co-led by Sequoia and American Strategic […]
Every single day, we write stories about all of the new hardware and software coming onto the market and into warfighters’ hands. It’s a lot to keep up with (enough, even, for a fairly substantial daily newsletter). All that innovation and energy is great and needed, but staying up to date with the changing technologies […]
Here we were thinking that defense tech’s exit era would look like giant primes buying up smaller startups. Turns out we were wrong—at least for now. Yesterday, electric aviation hotshot (and Anduril BFF) Archer Aviation announced that it would acquire three of Boeing’s autonomous flight subsidiaries—Wisk, SkyGrid and Insitu—giving the prime a 20 percent stake […]
Everyone really is on the non-kinetic-weapon hype train right now, aren’t they? This morning, high-powered-microwave (HPM) giant Epirus announced that they’ve been awarded an $11M contract by the US Marine Corps for the High-power Microwave Autonomous Vehicle Operational Capability (HAVOC) program. Under the contract, Epirus will deliver “its latest high-power microwave (HPM) system for counter-UAS […]
