Latest Stories
Airis Labs Emerges from Stealth with $60M
Another day, another pile of cash being poured into defense and security AI. This morning, US-Israeli AI startup Airis Labs emerged from stealth with $60M in funding and a mission to take all of the video out there and turn it into actionable intelligence. A big chunk of that cash comes from a $31M Series […]
RevEng.AI Raises $15M Led by the NIF
We’re back with some super-cyber nuts and bolts, friends. This morning, AI-for-cybersecurity startup RevEng.AI announced that it’s raised a $15M Series A to further advance its cyberthreat-detecting AI software and expand into the United States. The round was led by the NATO Innovation Fund with participation from Sands Capital, In-Q-Tel (IQT), IQ Capital, and Episode […]
Exclusive: Rune Rolls Out Autonomous Vehicle Logistics Kit
By now (unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past few years), you’re probably well aware that the US military is going all-in on autonomous vehicles. And if you read Tectonic, you’ll know that there are a whole lot of companies making them. When those many thousands of autonomous vehicles are fielded, each […]
Vector-SR2 Team Unveils a Saudi-built Shahed Drone Clone
Looks like Saudi Arabia and Utah have more in common than deserts. SR2Vector, a joint venture between Saudi Arabia’s SR2 Defense Systems and Utah-based startup Vector, has unveiled a co-produced Shahed-esque (or in US terms, LUCAS-esque) long-range one-way attack drone called SKYWASP, which’ll be manufactured at the JV’s upcoming factory near Riyadh. The news was […]
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 […]
