Well, looks like the sailboat drones are getting a major, deadly upgrade. Yesterday, USV company Saildrone announced that it’s secured a $50M investment from Lockheed Martin and that it will build a whole bunch of the prime’s weapons onto its boats. Saildrone CEO Rich Jenkins also told Tectonic that the two companies will work together […]
In the near-future battlefield, and today in Ukraine, swarms of friendly drones will be deployed as fast as enemy ones come in. For counter-drone tech, knowing which ones to shoot down can be hard. On Wednesday, Allen Control Systems unveiled a solution to this conundrum: A cryptographically secure, radio-silent identification friend-or-foe (IFF) system that tells […]
There’s a lot of hype around both drones and space-based tech, and Radical Aero wants to capitalize on both. The Seattle-based stratospheric aircraft startup emerged from stealth after a $4.5M seed round last April and is making autonomous solar-powered drones that fly at high altitudes for months at a time. And on Wednesday, the company […]
Strap in. We’re taking another trip to outer space, friends. Yesterday, SATCOM company ALL.SPACE announced that it’s teaming up with connectivity company and Google spinout Aalyria to combine the former’s Hydra terminals with the latter’s Spacetime network orchestration software. Now, why do we as defense tech nerds care? Well, in layman’s terms, this means that […]
In case you’ve been living under a rock, Germany has done a pretty sharp U-turn on the whole “we’re pacifists” thing it’s had going since the end of WWII. In the past few months, the country has placed some big-time defense orders, passed a bill introducing voluntary military service and potentially conscription, exempted defense spending […]
We talk a whole lot about the hardware and software that enable warfighting in this newsletter, but there is a whole other corner of defense that we haven’t shed a lot of light on: biosecurity. But perhaps it’s time we paid this sci-fi-scary corner of the defense tech world a little bit more attention. On […]
It never hurts to have a few well-connected friends, especially one with a key to the White House. Late last week, Donald Trump Jr.-backed drone and drone component company Unusual Machines ($UMAC) announced that it has won a contract to supply the Army with 3,500 drone motors and other components. Business as (un)usual. Built different: […]
The hype for hypersonics is back, baby. On Friday, hypersonic missile company Castelion announced that it has won multiple awards to integrate its Blackbeard “hypersonic strike weapon” (read: super-fast missile) onto operational US Army and Navy platforms. Castelion couldn’t reveal too many details of the contracts—the DoD is keeping deets hush-hush during the shutdown—but Castelion […]
If you’re going to make friends as an autonomy company, it’s probably pretty helpful if one of those friends is one of the most powerful and valuable chip companies in the world. Yesterday, maritime autonomy darling Saronic announced that it’s officially inked a “strategic collaboration” with the chipmaking giant NVIDIA (which has a $4.43T market […]
In case you weren’t aware, Europe is, like, kinda freaking out over its defense posture. There’s a whole-ass war still waging on its eastern front, the US has become a less-than-reliable ally, and, well, defense stores are not necessarily where everyone wants them to be. Defense budgets are on the rise, but the continent—based on […]
