Latest Stories
Hermeus’ Latest Quarterhorse Supersonic Unmanned Aircraft Takes Flight
Things are speeding up on the supersonic front, and fast. High-speed aircraft company Hermeus announced this week that it has successfully completed a flight test of its unmanned Quarterhorse Mk 2.1, which it calls the “world’s first high-Mach remotely piloted aircraft,” less than a year after the first iteration took flight. Everyone loves a spicy […]
Red Cat and ACS Team Up
Another day, another pretty lethal-sounding mash-up. Earlier this week, AI-powered machine gun turret startup Allen Control Systems announced that it’s officially teaming up with drone giant Red Cat as part of their Futures Initiative to build their Bullfrog platform onto Red Cat’s unmanned surface vessels (USVs). Who said you can’t teach an old frog new […]
Defense AI Lab Smack Raises $32M Seed and Series A
It’s been a busy, beefy week for the Pentagon and a certain AI giant, but a startup out of El Segundo has a solution to those tensions: Just build an AI lab purpose-built for national security. And investors are on board. Yesterday, Smack Technologies announced a combo Seed and Series A round to build what […]
Exclusive: Worldscape.ai Raises $6M Seed
The markets may be in a panic over AI (and, like, at least three other things), but the hype for AI-powered defense tech continues. This morning, AI-powered geospatial intelligence startup Worldscape.ai announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic that they’ve closed a $6M seed round led by Scout Ventures, with participation from Radius and Washington […]
A Q + A with Matt Cronin, Senior National Security Advisor at a16z
If there is one VC fund you know in the defense tech world, it’s probably Andreesen Horowitz—or a16z, as the cool kids say. The firm—which just raised a casual $15B, including $1.176B for its “national interest” (defense and deep tech) focused American Dynamism fund—has backed some of the biggest names in the game, including Anduril, […]
Q + A: A.J. Bertone, Managing Partner, In-Q-Tel
If you’ve been paying attention to the past year of Tectonic (!!), you’ll recognize a sneaky three-letter acronym that pops up on a lot of defense tech cap tables: IQT. For those lucky enough not to be in the know, that stands for In-Q-Tel, a not-for-profit venture fund backed by the US government and investing […]
A Q+A with Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper
Mark Esper has spent a whole heck of a lot of time in the defense ecosystem. After a decade in uniform in the US Army, he worked as a congressional staffer, a senior policy aide to Sens. Chuck Hagel and Bill Frist, and a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the early 2000s. Then, he […]
A Q+A with Alex Ferrara, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners
If there is one fund that knows how to deploy big-time cash into tech companies, it’s Bessemer Venture Partners. The Silicon Valley fund has about $19B under management, and has invested in tech giants from LinkedIn (everyone’s fav) to Shopify. This year, the fund has turned to defense—specifically, European defense. They led Auterion’s $130M Series […]
