Shipbuilding is so back, baby. Less than a week after announcing a whopping $300M investment in its Louisiana shipyard, Texas-based autonomous shipbuilder Saronic revealed yesterday that it’s won a $392M Other Transaction Agreement (OTA) to supply the Navy with an undisclosed number of unmanned surface vessels. Talk about demand signal. Making a splash: The $392M […]
The hype for hypersonics is back, baby. On Friday, El Segundo-based hypersonic missile startup Castelion announced that they’ve officially closed their $350M Series B, led by Altimeter Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Lavrock Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, First In, Space VC, Cantos, BlueYard, Avenir, Champion Hill, and Interlagos. The round—first rumored […]
We can all breathe a sigh of relief. On Sunday night, Congress finally released a compromise draft of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a breezy 3,000-page bill that authorizes a record $901B in defense spending, $8B more than the White House initially requested. The must-pass bill is headed for a vote in the coming […]
If anyone thinks M&A isn’t the road to success, someone better tell the defense tech world—and fast. Earlier this week, European defense tech darling STARK announced that it has acquired AeroMass Technologies, a “distributed manufacturing company” that says it builds “scalable, attritable systems for the modern battlefield.” The move comes just a few months after […]
When you think of European defense tech hotspots, Croatia probably isn’t the first country that comes to mind—but maybe it should. Earlier this week, Orqa FPV announced that it has boosted its annual production capacity to 280,000 NDAA-compliant, Chinese-component-free FPV drones at its headquarters in Osijek, Croatia. That big bump, CEO Srdjan Kovacevic told Tectonic, […]
If you’ve been tracking some numbers coming out of the Pentagon recently, you’ll have seen a whole lot of zeroes. Earlier this week, the Department of Defense/War (take your pick, we don’t judge) dropped a whopping $150B solicitation for the Missile Defense Agency’s Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense (SHIELD) program, tapping over 1,000 “qualifying […]
Saronic is making a big splash down south. On Wednesday, the autonomous surface vessel (ASV) heavyweight announced it’s making a $300M investment in its Franklin, Louisiana, shipyard, a move the company says will speed up its delivery of those robo-ships the Navy so desperately wants. Future fleet, here we come. Splashing around: Saronic has a […]
We’ve talked a lot about electronic warfare recently, and it looks like we’re not stopping anytime soon. This morning, in an exclusive interview with Tectonic, Sky Spy—a signal intelligence startup born on Ukraine’s frontlines—announced that they’ve raised a $1.6M pre-seed led by Expeditions Fund and Superangel, with participation from Freedom Fund, Sunfish Partners, Crosscourt Ventures, […]
‘Tis the season of team-ups, and it looks like the primes have new friends in the startup world on their Christmas list. On Tuesday, defense prime Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) and autonomy quasi-startup Applied Intuition announced they’re joining forces to introduce vehicle autonomy to SNC’s fleet of mobile c-UAS and air defense platforms. Shoot ‘em […]
If all goes according to plan, a handful of nuclear fission firms in the US will finally switch on their microreactor and small modular reactors before Independence Day. And Antares—a Redondo Beach, CA-based company building small-scale nuclear fission reactors for remote deployment—has just raised a fresh batch of funding to fuel its run-up to that […]
