Well, it’s been quite the week for Forterra—and it’s only Tuesday. Less than a week after announcing that they’re teaming up with BAE, the ground autonomy company announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic that they’re officially unveiling a prototype of the DeepFires autonomous launcher—built with Oshkosh and RTX—at AUSA next week. The autonomous launcher […]
For all those SBIR skeptics out there, this one’s for you. In an exclusive release to Tectonic, San Diego-based small unmanned surface vessel (sUSV) startup Seasats announced today that it’s snagged an $89M ceiling SBIR Phase 3 indefinite-delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract with the Navy to deliver its Lightfish USVs to the Marine Corps. Talk about […]
Picogrid is rapidly building up a truly impressive circle of friends. Just two weeks after teaming up with Northrop Grumman’s c-UAS platform, the startup announced late last week that its flagship software integration system, Legion, will be plugging into Palantir’s ultra-popular Maven Smart System (MSS). Picogrid says that Legion will act as a “universal translator,” […]
Mortars are pretty dumb and only go so far. A new start-up called Aventra wants to change that. Earlier this week, the company emerged from stealth with $3M in seed funding led by Lavrock Ventures and a high-altitude, balloon-dropped, modular payload glider that makes dumb bombs smart and long-range strikes cheap. Everyone loves things that […]
The partnerships keep coming on both sides of the pond. This morning, Harmattan AI, the white-hot French autonomous systems startup launched last year, announced a partnership with Ukrainian drone-maker Skyeton to integrate its Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) system on Skyeton’s Raybird ISR drone. Oui oui, indeed. Doing deals: In its first year of existence, Harmattan […]
Another day, another (speedy quick) partnership. This morning, maritime autonomy company HavocAI announced that it’s teamed up with engine manufacturer Ilmor to equip its vessels with some fancy-shmancy high-powered electric propulsion motors. The two companies say they’ll build an outboard system called the ION Unleashed—a souped-up, defense-grade version of Ilmor’s consumer ION 6 motor—designed to […]
The autumn of collabs continues. Yesterday, ground autonomy company Forterra announced that it’s collaborating with defense giant BAE to “rapidly prototype” an autonomous Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle (AMPV). The partnership is the first to be announced as part of a push to upgrade the AMPV’s capabilities, unveiled last month. “Working with BAE puts Forterra’s autonomy stack […]
Whoever thought the “maritime autonomy was all the rage” era was over, think again. This morning, European defense tech company STARK announced that they’re officially entering the maritime domain with a range of unmanned surface vessels (USVs), tested for the past month at NATO’s REP(MUS) exercise. The drone boats—called Vanta—will come in two flavors (Vanta-4 […]
Many startups are making drones. Some are making missiles. Few are making mid-size drones that fire missiles. On Monday, Aeon and Delta Black announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic that they’re partnering to fill that gap by adding Aeon’s software-defined Zeus missiles onto Delta Black’s RAIDER 330 Group 3 drone. (Ae)On Fire: Aeon, founded […]
Like the rest of Silicon Valley, Scale AI has quickly become a big-time defense contractor since, well, AI is all the rage in the Pentagon right now. On Wednesday, the AI training data startup—which Meta took a 49 percent stake in for a cool $15B in June—announced its expanded physical AI data engine platform for […]
