Featured
Exclusive: Counter-Drone Startup Fortem Raises $50M Series B
The round follows an initial $25M investment from Lockheed Martin back in April.
Tectonic in your inbox
Get daily insights on the most important news impacting defense innovation.
Tectonic European Defense Summit
Recent Stories
Saronic Wins Roughly $400M Production OTA for Marauder
Well, jeez. We knew maritime autonomy was all the rage, but the US government (and a certain Texas-based drone producer) are getting mega-serious about it. Yesterday, not-so-tiny USV startup Saronic announced that it’s been awarded a production OTA under the US Navy’s Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel (MUSV) Marketplace for Marauder, its 180-foot autonomous ship. Under […]
Biothreat Detection Startup Pilgrim Raises $25M
There’s no shortage of enemy missiles, drones, and other go-boom tech keeping us up at night, but it’s time for a dose of the super-scary, invisible threats we talk about a lot less. Luckily, one startup is hard at work building the tech to help us detect them, and it’s catching the attention of the […]
The View from Kyiv (Part One)
Tectonic met with the people at the heart of Ukraine’s defense tech industry during a trip to Kyiv.
The Pod
Valley of Depth is a podcast about the technologies that matter – and the people building them.
Investment
Tech
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 […]