Last week, Northrop Grumman announced that the US Army’s 101st Airborne Division put its Lumberjack Group 3 UAS—kitted out with AI-enabled targeting courtesy of Palantir’s Maven Smart System and a six-pound precision strike munition—to the test during the recent Operation Lethal Eagle exercise, roughly a year after it was first unveiled. Looks like the primes […]
Well, the $1.5T defense budget is here, friends. In case you missed it—on Friday, the Trump administration unveiled its FY2027 budget request. As promised, it included a chunk for defense ($1.15T discretionary and $350B mandatory, reconciliation style), larger than the GDP of Turkey. Yes, that is a real statistic. On the menu? Big bucks for […]
Well, these certainly ain’t your granny’s quadcopter drones. Yesterday, autonomy and swarming software hotshot Auterion announced that it has teamed up with UK-based MGI Engineering—a, well, engineering firm—to successfully fly a cruise missile-like drone called TigerShark in the UK. According to the two companies, TigerShark can: MGI and Auterion say this is “the first time […]
The folks building the factories of the future are certainly having a moment right now. Yesterday, software-defined manufacturing startup UNION and solid rocket motor-maker X-Bow Systems (pronounced crossbow, btw) teamed up to build “surge-capable” propulsion system production capacity, which X-Bow CGO Maureen Gannon told Tectonic is a “direct response” to the AFRL’s “Endless Forge” initiative. […]
We’ve heard of forward-deployed engineers and manufacturing, but now Applied Intuition wants to make autonomy testing mobile. Earlier this week, autonomy giant Applied Intuition rolled out Edge, a “mobile operations center” designed to facilitate the development, testing, and operation of autonomous systems at, well, the edge. Sim-er down: We’ve covered Applied Intuition before, but as […]
You know an industry is blowing up when the private equity (PE) guys are coming for it. Yesterday, New York and Florida-based PE fund OceanSound Partners closed a $3.4B Fund II to invest in “technology and technology-enabled services companies serving aerospace, defense, government and highly regulated enterprise end markets.” The oversubscribed fund (goal was $2B) […]
It’s been a busy few days for the folks over at Firehawk. Yesterday, energetics and rocket motor-maker Firehawk Aerospace cut the ribbon at a big ol’ rocket integration facility in Mississippi, where, as told in an exclusive release to Tectonic, the company has snagged a contract to assemble Hydra-70 rockets. To cap things off, they’ll […]
In case you weren’t aware, defense isn’t always about the stuff that goes boom. Sometimes it’s about the (arguably much scarier) stuff we can’t immediately see. Lucky for us, a newly funded startup is here to help. This morning, Dutch biotech company Inbiome announced that it has raised a $16M Series A co-led by the […]
If you’ve seen—or been on—the battlefield in Ukraine, one of the most significant shifts in drone warfare has been the proliferation of fiber-optic FPV drones. There’s a good reason for that: most UAV detection tech relies on RF sensing or expensive radars, which can be easily sidestepped—or saturated—by RF-silent drones. Enter brand-spanking-new startup RADD. This […]
If anyone thought the hype for maritime would fade, what with the whole “potential extended ground war in Iran” thing, think again. This morning, autonomous maritime giant Saronic announced that it’s raised a $1.75B Series D—yes, billion with a “B”—at a $9.25B post-money valuation. Again, yes, that’s all with a “B”. The round was led […]
