Latest Stories
Dominion Dynamics Invests $37M to Get Canada in the CCA Game
After a quiet few years, it looks like our friendly neighbors up north are diving headfirst into defense tech. Hot off a $15.2M ($21M CAD) seed round in January, Canadian defense tech startup Dominion Dynamics kicked things up a notch late last week, announcing plans to invest $37M ($50M CAD) to kickstart development of Scout, […]
Exclusive: Orqa Raises $14.7M, Heads to the US
Remember on Friday when we said that the Americans were coming? Well, turns out the Europeans are coming, too. This morning, FPV hotshot Orqa announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic that they’ve raised a €12.7M ($14.7M) Series A led by Expeditions Ventures and signed a teaming agreement with Texas-based Red River Army Depot to […]
Nominal Raises $80M at a $1B Valuation
Welp, the Anduril mafia and Nominal are making things super-extra-official. Yesterday, the testing startup announced that it’s raised a whopping $80M “acceleration round” (their term) led by Founders Fund, valuing the company at $1B. Nominal co-founder Bryce Strauss told Tectonic that the cash money will be used to double the size of their team and […]
UNION and Hanwha Team Up on 155mm Production
The state of the UNION is growing. (Bada-bing!!) Yesterday, Texas-based software-defined factory startup UNION announced a partnership with Hanwha Defense USA, the US arm of the South Korean mega-prime, to speed up production of 155mm shells. Hegseth may be saying the US has plenty of munitions—but sounds like UNION’s betting we’ll want even more. Rippin’ […]
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 […]
