Lock in, kids. We’re playing with rocks today. Yesterday, AI-powered mining and refining company Mariana Minerals announced that it’s raised a $310M Series B led by Khosla Ventures, bringing total funding to about $400M. Mariana CEO and co-founder Turner Caldwell told Tectonic that they’ll use the funding to scale up their current mining operations—Copper One […]
You can buy pretty much anything on Amazon, but military equipment is (so far) off-limits. Luckily for all of the shopaholic soldiers out there, the Pentagon’s JIATF-401 counter-drone task force is taking a page out of Amazon’s book and building Prime for the primes (and startups). Today, they officially unveiled an online marketplace for companies […]
The nuclear startup world is going, well, nuclear. Yesterday, El Segundo-based Valar Atomics announced a whopping $1B Series B led by Sequoia Capital. The raise comes hot on the heels of the three-year-old startup’s microreactor hitting criticality (when a nuclear chain reaction becomes self-sustaining) in the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program, a partnership with […]
Looks like the Army’s keeping its foot on the gas in its push for more ground autonomy. On Friday, American Rheinmetall announced that it’s snagged a contract to serve as the prime integrator for a team of companies—Harbinger, Forterra, and Primordial Labs—that will develop autonomous logistics ground vehicles for the Army’s Project Sustainment initiative. Ghost […]
The loan is designed to “establish high-volume domestic manufacturing capacity for critical drone components.”
Sounds like someone is learning some lessons in the Strait of Hormuz. In case you missed it, on Wednesday DIU (which, apparently, has been renamed the War Department Innovation Unit) released a solicitation looking for USVs “fully integrated with two or more mature, market-ready aerial drones to detect, identify, track, and defeat hostile threats.” The […]
The Lightfish USV had recently completed the first autonomous transit of the Taiwan Strait.
Well, if you have a solution that you think can take down drones better than anyone else’s, now’s your moment. Yesterday, Brave1—Ukraine’s defense innovation cluster—announced that applications are officially open for the UNITE – Brave NATO joint innovation program. The program—first announced in late 2025—is designed to “bring together Ukrainian defense companies and companies from […]
Told you the Europeans were getting (kind of) serious about the whole drones and autonomy thing. Yesterday, the European Defense Agency (the EU’s joint defense capability organization) announced that it’s down-selected five companies for stage two of its Sentinel Strike Challenge for loitering munitions. Each company will get €30,000 to move on to stage two, […]
The $100M OTA allows customers to flexibly buy Hidden Level’s drone-detecting passive radars.
