Young money: Last Wednesday, California-based defense start-up Mach Industries made a hell of an announcement: they raised a $100M Series B led by Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures at a $470M valuation. Impressive stuff, but even more impressive when you consider that the company was founded just two years ago by Ethan Thornton, a now-21-year-old […]
Once upon a time (last Friday), before the US had struck Iran and sent us all into an X-fuelled tailspin, a pretty interesting announcement came out of the tail-end of the Paris Air Show: Electra.aero (maker of the ultra-short takeoff and landing EL9 aircraft) and Lockheed Martin Skunk Works ($LMT) are teaming up. According to […]
Another day, another huge piece of news for European defense tech. This morning, Anduril announced a strategic partnership with German defense prime Rheinmetall to co-produce a suite of autonomous air systems and propulsion capabilities for militaries on the continent. As we said yesterday: Zeitenwende, indeed. Anduril and Rheinmetall’s partnership will center around three capabilities: The […]
In a week that has seen some big investments in defense tech (looking at you, Applied Intuition), we’ve got yet another heavy hitter: German AI and drone company Helsing announced Tuesday that they’ve raised $691M in a Series D funding round, valuing it at nearly $14B. Did we mention that it’s only Tuesday?
Remember when we said that maritime is all the rage? Well, we’re back to prove our point. This week, AI-powered sonar company Andrenam announced they’ve raised $10M in seed funding to build out their core tech – a distributed network of underwater acoustic sensors. When Tectonic chatted with Cernosek about the raise, he was on […]
Another day, another big ‘ol piece of news from Applied Intuition. Yesterday, we wrote about how the autonomous vehicle startup (can they still be called that?) spun out an autonomous ISV in 10 days. And today, they closed a $600M Series F fundraise and tender offer at a whopping $15B valuation. For those keeping score […]
Gecko’s a unicorn: It’s been a big year for Pittsburgh-based Gecko Robotics. In the past few months, they’ve signed a $100M deal with a top US power grid operator, partnered with L3Harris on remote aircraft maintenance, and—last but certainly not least—hit unicorn status last week after raising $125M at a $1.25B valuation. That’s a lot […]
One day last month, a very precious delivery arrived at autonomous vehicle company Applied Intuition’s garage: a Humvee and an infantry squad vehicle (ISV), sent by the Secretary of the Army, Daniel P. Driscoll, himself. He had visited the company’s headquarters with Army Chief of Staff Randy George a few days prior, seen the company’s […]
Autonomous fighter jets, here we come. This week, Germany-based artificial intelligence company Helsing announced that their AI agent Centaur successfully took control of a Swedish Saab Gripen-E combat jet in flight tests over the Baltic Sea. According to the company, Centaur took over long-range flight controls from a human pilot, pulled off some complex flight […]
It’s been quite the week for Pete Hegseth. In the past few days, he faced lawmakers on the Hill for the first time since becoming SecDef to defend a $1T DoD budget request that, well, he hasn’t released. Then, the House went ahead and released their appropriations bill, his procurement budget was leaked, and he […]
