Latest Stories
3D-Printed Engine Startup Beehive Snags $30M Air Force Contract
The engine biz is getting buzzy, and the Pentagon is taking notice. Beehive Industries, a Colorado-based 3D-printed jet engine startup, snagged a $29.7M Air Force contract yesterday to complete vehicle integration and flight testing, and qualification of their Frenzy 8 engine—designed as a lower-cost alternative for small cruise missiles and loitering munitions—and accelerate development of […]
Cambridge Aerospace Scores UK MoD Contract
Interceptors really are so hot right now. This morning at the London Defense Conference, UK Secretary of State for Defense John Healey announced that the MoD will buy “hundreds” of Skyhammer interceptors from startup Cambridge Aerospace as part of a “multi-million-pound” contract. The deal covers “integration, technical support, and end user training,” and the company […]
Fusion Startup Avalanche Secures $5.2M From DARPA for Nuclear Batteries
There’s a lot of energy around fusion lately. Yesterday, Avalanche Fusion, a Seattle-based fusion startup making teeny tiny desktop-sized fusion reactors, snagged a $5.2M contract from DARPA to turn nuclear radiation into electricity for nuclear batteries under the Pentagon research agency’s Rads to Watts program. Teeny tiny: Most fusion startups are thinking pretty big, working […]
General Cherry and Orqa Team Up
Those Ukrainian defense tech companies we have been going on and on about are certainly having a moment. On Tuesday, Croatian drone hotshot Orqa FPV announced that it’s inked a “memorandum of cooperation” with Ukrainian interceptor wunderkind General Cherry to bring the latter’s tech to Europe and NATO. The two companies plan to start co-producing […]
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 […]
