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First Look: Agon Emerges from Stealth with $30M in Funding
The London- and Berlin-based startup secured $30M across two rounds to train autonomous systems.
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Applied Intuition Turns AV’s Mayhem 10 Drone into a Swarm
It seems like anywhere autonomy is involved, Applied Intuition finds a way to wiggle in. This time, it’s with defense tech heavyweight AV (FKA AeroVironment). The $15B autonomy software startup announced this morning that it’s teaming up with AV to integrate its Acuity ISR/Strike swarming software into the latter’s Mayhem 10 “launched effects” (fancy term […]
Pentagon Inks Patriot and THAAD Component Deal with L3Harris
The Pentagon’s framework agreements with Lockheed to triple and quadruple Patriot and THAAD production (respectively) made a big splash, but it looks like the department heard that those numbers would be pretty hard to hit if production of their key components didn’t get some love, too. Luckily, they’re moving to fix that missile pickle. Yesterday, […]
Exclusive: Array Labs Raises $21M Led by Mitsubishi Electric
The space-based radar startup’s funding round will fund R&D and its expansion into the Indo-Pacific.
The Pod
Valley of Depth is a podcast about the technologies that matter – and the people building them.
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Big Conversations
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 […]