Looks like Rise8 is, well, on the rise. Earlier today, the Tampa-based software delivery startup announced that it won a contract with the US Space Force’s Future Operationally Resilient Ground Evolution (FORGE) program to provide continuous software delivery capabilities. In layman’s terms, that means the company will help build out the software pipeline that helps […]
The money moves just keep on coming. Last week, Business Insider reported that national security VC America’s Frontier Fund—of Venus Aerospace and Foundation Alloy fame—is raising $315M for its deep-tech focused Frontier Fund. According to a fund insider Tectonic spoke to on condition of anonymity (those pesky SEC regulations), the raise will officially close in […]
In case you haven’t read the news lately, President Trump has faced a bit of an uphill battle securing peace deals in Ukraine and Gaza. But he has had success in an unlikely place: the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Last week, Rwanda and the Congo—bad history there, we’ll get into that—signed a deal under […]
Turns out the European defense tech companies are making money moves, too. This morning, “next-generation defense prime” Harmattan AI announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic that they’ve secured a more than $10M (double-digit millions) contract from a “large NATO country” to deliver AI-enabled small drones. Though Harmattan was scant with details on the contract, […]
Cash-telion: The hype for hypersonics is real. In its FY26 budget, the Army is requesting $25M to develop “Blackbeard” hypersonic missiles made by Castelion—just five months after the California-based missile startup raised $100M in a Series A funding round. Talk about a hot launch. Origin story: Castelion was founded in 2022 by three SpaceX alums—Bryon […]
Aid paused (again): After meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at last week’s NATO summit in The Hague, President Donald Trump was pretty gung-ho on Kyiv. When asked about whether the country would receive more desperately-needed Patriots, he said they “want to have the anti-missile missiles, as they call them, and we’re going to see if […]
As the saying goes, there are some weeks where decades happen. Between intel leaks at home, the NATO summit in The Hague, and a rather unorthodox ceasefire in Iran, last week was (another) one of those in the defense world. And then came the kicker: On Thursday, the Pentagon unveiled its FY26 budget request. Like, […]
By this point, we all get the gist of what happened last weekend. Super-early Sunday morning Tehran time, US B-2 stealth bombers flew 37 hours nonstop from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to Iran and back, dropping more than a dozen 30,000-pound “bunker buster” GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs) on three Iranian nuclear enrichment […]
Ah, to be a fly on the wall of the NATO summit. In case you missed it, alliance leaders met this week in the Hague and, well, they had a lot to talk about. Some highlights included: Trump flying in pretty pissed at Iran and Israel, Rutte sending Trump a wall of complimentary text (and […]
If we’ve learned anything from the budget and reconciliation drama of the past few weeks, it’s that the way money moves around Washington is, like, extraordinarily complicated. Between the congressional infighting, creative allocation maneuvers (looking at you, BBB), and the missing details, things can get confusing real quick. Well, the good news is, looks like […]
