Take a quick look around the defense startup scene, and you’ll notice that pretty much every company bills its tech as “tested in Ukraine.” Far fewer can say that they’re trusted in Ukraine. Forterra actually can. Yesterday, the ground autonomy startup revealed that it has sent over 100 Lancer autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs)—based on the […]
Remember when Y-Combinator graduates were building food delivery startups and e-commerce sites? Yeah, those days are well and truly gone. This morning, integration startup Surtr—part of YC’s Spring ’26 cohort—announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic that it’s raised a $4.8M pre-seed round to build software that brings all the different sensors, command tools, and […]
Lasers and partnering with Rheinmetall…so hot right now. Directed energy startup Aurelius Systems is teaming up with the German mega-prime’s American subsidiary to integrate its drone-downing laser weapon, Archimedes, onto a Rheinmetall unmanned ground vehicle, the company exclusively told Tectonic. The partnership is the first for Aurelius and, since they aren’t planning to make ground […]
You know how we say we love the unsexy side of defense? Well, we’re back with some news from the unsexiest place we can imagine—the land of the nitty gritty back office paperwork that makes the cool stuff actually happen. Luckily, one startup is on a mission to make that tedious but super important work […]
Well, the moment you’ve all been waiting for is finally here. Late last week, the Ukrainian government officially announced its first mechanism for exporting defense and military technology to partner nations. Under the setup—in the works for nearly two years—the government will maintain pretty tight control over exports, but manufacturers will (at long last) be […]
The great defense tech rollup is well underway, and Ondas ($ONDS) is quietly leading the charge. This morning, the drone and counter-drone roll-up announced that it’s acquired California-based drone company DZYNE Technologies for a whopping $875.8M, forming a new business unit with fellow Ondas portfolio company World View (acquired in April) that’ll be focused on […]
If you can believe it, today marks the halfway point of the year, and we’d be the first to tell you that it’s been a pretty wild ride in defense tech so far. As it turns out, the numbers back up our—and, if you’re reading this newsletter, your—excitement. According to Pitchbook data provided to Tectonic, […]
You know what sucks? When you’ve got a drone on mission with no (or limited) comms and it gets lost with no satellite data to fall back again. Can be a pretty pricey—or at least deeply annoying—issue. Well, good news is, visual navigation startup Vermeer has come up with a solution. This morning, the company […]
Well, jeez. We thought Quantum Systems was already having quite the year—turns out we didn’t know the half of it. This morning, the German autonomy giant announced that it’s raised a $1.2B Series D at a $8B valuation, co-led by Blackstone, Noteus, Airbus, and Advent. The company says it will use the money to “accelerate […]
If you read Tectonic, you’ll probably be aware of two things: Hypersonic weapons are in high demand these days, and the government wants to move fast to field them. Like, really fast. That’s all well and good, but one super-underappreciated part of that story is that testing these systems—especially the unsexy stuff like coatings, ceramic […]
