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 […]
Another day, another huge piece of news for European defense tech. This morning, Anduril announced a strategic partnership with German defense prime Rheinmetall to co-produce a suite of autonomous air systems and propulsion capabilities for militaries on the continent. As we said yesterday: Zeitenwende, indeed. Anduril and Rheinmetall’s partnership will center around three capabilities: The […]
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?
Remember when we said that maritime is all the rage? Well, we’re back to prove our point. This week, AI-powered sonar company Andrenam announced they’ve raised $10M in seed funding to build out their core tech – a distributed network of underwater acoustic sensors. When Tectonic chatted with Cernosek about the raise, he was on […]
One day last month, a very precious delivery arrived at autonomous vehicle company Applied Intuition’s garage: a Humvee and an infantry squad vehicle (ISV), sent by the Secretary of the Army, Daniel P. Driscoll, himself. He had visited the company’s headquarters with Army Chief of Staff Randy George a few days prior, seen the company’s […]
Gecko’s a unicorn: It’s been a big year for Pittsburgh-based Gecko Robotics. In the past few months, they’ve signed a $100M deal with a top US power grid operator, partnered with L3Harris on remote aircraft maintenance, and—last but certainly not least—hit unicorn status last week after raising $125M at a $1.25B valuation. That’s a lot […]
Autonomous fighter jets, here we come. This week, Germany-based artificial intelligence company Helsing announced that their AI agent Centaur successfully took control of a Swedish Saab Gripen-E combat jet in flight tests over the Baltic Sea. According to the company, Centaur took over long-range flight controls from a human pilot, pulled off some complex flight […]
If you thought you’d seen the end of defense tech start-ups teaming up, think again. This morning, unmanned surface vessel (USV) company Havoc AI announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic that they’re teaming up with Tocaro Blue to integrate the company’s ProteusCore™ marine radar processing system onto Havoc’s vessels. Paul Lwin, CEO of Havoc […]
Everyone really is making that great leap across the pond. Yesterday, geospatial intelligence company Maxar announced that it’s teaming up with Swedish defense giant Saab to build space-based C5ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, for the uninitiated) told to help militaries “stay connected and aware, even when GPS goes down.” “By […]
Remember when Meta was very, very careful to distance itself from defense? Oh, and also when Anduril founder Palmer Luckey was ousted from the company (then called Facebook) in 2017? Well, times they have a-changed. Late last week, Anduril and Meta announced a strategic partnership to build extended reality (XR) products for the US military. […]
