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 […]
It’s been quite the week for collaborative combat aircraft (CCA). Just as European defense tech giant Helsing unveiled its own drone fighter concept in Munich yesterday, there was some pretty big news on the US front: Aviation Week reported that Shield AI and Raytheon (RTX) have been tapped to provide autonomy software for the U.S. […]
Well, turns out everyone really does want their own unmanned fighter. This morning, on Grob Aircraft’s very rainy airfield just outside of Munich, European defense darling Helsing unveiled their own concept for an autonomous fighter jet—the CA-1 Europa. In a high-octane presentation (we’re talking strobe lights and smoke machines, people), the neoprime pulled back the […]
We told you that collabs were all the rage. Yesterday, aviation giant GE Aerospace announced that it has teamed up with defense AI startup Merlin Labs to develop an “autonomy core” to build into its avionics system. In a statement, the two companies said that this “next-generation autonomy and pilot-assist platform will be designed to […]
