Latest Stories
Cummings Successfully Demos Anti-Armor Warhead
Well, the dronemakers are certainly stepping up their game. This morning, Huntsville-based Cummings Aerospace announced that they’ve successfully completed arena testing for an anti-armor warhead for their three-foot-long Hellhound S3 drone. Cummings founder and CEO Sheila Cummings told Tectonic that the warhead-equipped drone was able to blast through several sheets of steel—mimicking a tank or […]
Antares Nuclear Moves Into “Final Innings” in Race to Switch on Microreactor
The race between a handful of nuclear fission startups to switch on their microreactor and small modular reactors before Independence Day is heating up. Yesterday, Los Angeles-based space and defense-focused nuclear startup Antares moved into the “final innings” of turning on its Mark-0 microreactor after the Department of Energy approved its Documented Safety Analysis (DSA), […]
Army Tests Northrop Grumman’s Lumberjack Group 3 Strike Drone
Last week, Northrop Grumman announced that the US Army’s 101st Airborne Division put its Lumberjack Group 3 UAS—kitted out with AI-enabled targeting courtesy of Palantir’s Maven Smart System and a six-pound precision strike munition—to the test during the recent Operation Lethal Eagle exercise, roughly a year after it was first unveiled. Looks like the primes […]
The $1.5T Defense Budget
Well, the $1.5T defense budget is here, friends. In case you missed it—on Friday, the Trump administration unveiled its FY2027 budget request. As promised, it included a chunk for defense ($1.15T discretionary and $350B mandatory, reconciliation style), larger than the GDP of Turkey. Yes, that is a real statistic. On the menu? Big bucks for […]
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 […]
