Latest Stories
DoD Invests $43M in Critical Minerals Mine
Well, it seems the DoD, sorry, DoW, has really gotten a taste for critical minerals. Yesterday, Australian-American mining company Nova Minerals ($NVA) announced that it’s scored a $43.4M investment from the Pentagon to build out a production plant for a critical mineral called antimony in Alaska. The funding was awarded under the Defense Production Act […]
Guided Glider Bomb Startup Aventra Emerges From Stealth
Mortars are pretty dumb and only go so far. A new start-up called Aventra wants to change that. Earlier this week, the company emerged from stealth with $3M in seed funding led by Lavrock Ventures and a high-altitude, balloon-dropped, modular payload glider that makes dumb bombs smart and long-range strikes cheap. Everyone loves things that […]
Harmattan AI Joins Forces With Ukrainian Drone-Maker Skyeton
The partnerships keep coming on both sides of the pond. This morning, Harmattan AI, the white-hot French autonomous systems startup launched last year, announced a partnership with Ukrainian drone-maker Skyeton to integrate its Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) system on Skyeton’s Raybird ISR drone. Oui oui, indeed. Doing deals: In its first year of existence, Harmattan […]
HavocAI and Ilmor Team Up for Electric Motors
Another day, another (speedy quick) partnership. This morning, maritime autonomy company HavocAI announced that it’s teamed up with engine manufacturer Ilmor to equip its vessels with some fancy-shmancy high-powered electric propulsion motors. The two companies say they’ll build an outboard system called the ION Unleashed—a souped-up, defense-grade version of Ilmor’s consumer ION 6 motor—designed to […]
A Q+A with Arthur Herman and John Burer
If you’ve been in DC anytime in the past few years, you will have heard of Arthur Herman. In case you’re unfamiliar (nerd!), he wrote Freedom’s Forge back in 2012, which has shaped a lot of the First Breakfast-type reindustrialization conversations we’ve been having lately. Sparknotes: The book (if you haven’t read it or have […]
A Q+A with Enrique Oti, CSO at Second Front Systems
Personally, we would give a lot to be a fly on the wall in the early days of the Defense Innovation Unit (RIP Unit X). Luckily, we know a guy who was there. Enrique Oti—apparently referred to intermittently as “Software Jesus of the Air Force”—was one of the co-founders of DIU, and for much of […]
A Q+A with Mal Crease, CEO of Kraken
Some people like to take things slow. Other people—like Mal Crease—prefer everything at full throttle. The founder and CEO of USV company Kraken Technology came into defense from high-speed boat racing in 2020, and has brought the same obsession with speed and performance that once helped him break world records to the world of unmanned […]
A Q+A with Justin Fanelli, CTO of the Navy
If you’re a regular reader of Tectonic, you’ll know that the Navy is majorly changing the way it does things. There’s the Trump administration and SecNav Phelan’s focus on amping up shipbuilding, the push to amp up capabilities by 2027, and—just last week—the introduction of the Naval Rapid Capabilities Office. And that’s just the beginning, […]
