Latest Stories
ICYMI: Saronic Tapped for DARPA Pulling Guard Program
Look away, pirates: The Pentagon’s research agency is on a mission to make it a little bit harder to mess with unarmed vessels, and they’re betting that maritime autonomy hotshot Saronic can help them get there. Last week, DARPA tapped Saronic and three others to design and develop a semi-autonomous escort vessel under the Pulling […]
ICYMI: Autonomy Testing for CCA Begins
Well, the US certainly didn’t slow things down while we were all eating pretzels in Munich. In case you missed it: On Thursday, the US Air Force announced that it’s kicked off integrating and testing the mission autonomy packages for the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program. That’s the software brains, basically, that will make those […]
Nigeria’s Terra Industries Raises an Additional $22M
Watch out, because Terra is taking off. Yesterday, a few short weeks after raising $11.75M in a seed round led by 8VC, Nigerian autonomous systems startup Terra Industries announced they’ve tacked on another $22M in a strategic bridge round led by Lux Capital. That latest haul brings the company’s total seed funding to $34M at […]
Defense Project Management Startup Integrate Raises $17M
If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that the Pentagon is way too bureaucratic and siloed, especially when it comes to engaging with industry. Most of the proposed fixes to the Pentagon’s red-tape hellscape revolve around faster procurement, prototyping, and fielding. Seattle-based software startup Integrate is trying to solve a different bottleneck: […]
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 […]
