Latest Stories
MAKO (née MicroTau) Raises $20M for Shark Skin Film
Is it just us, or is the stuff we’re covering (looking at you, haptic controllers) getting more and more niche? This morning, Australian aerospace tech company MAKO (formerly known as MicroTau) announced that it’s raised AU$28M (US$20M) to scale up production of its—wait for it—“drag-reducing shark skin-inspired adhesive film for aviation,” known as Flightfilm. The […]
Drone Startup Elroy Air to Go Public Via $1B SPAC Deal
As we all know, there’s a whole lot of private capital going into defense these days, but more and more companies are jumping on the growing appetite in the public markets, too. On Friday, California-based heavy-lift drone startup Elroy Air announced plans to go public later this year through a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) […]
Code Metal Moves Into Signals Processing With First Acquisition
Making your first acquisition is a big moment in any startup’s life, and Code Metal is speedrunning it. Yesterday, Code Metal announced that they’ve snapped up Signal Processing Technologies (SPT), a move that takes the three-year-old startup from simply translating high-level code and algorithms onto hardware systems into actually developing the algorithms themselves, starting with […]
Vantor’s Big (European) Week
In case you haven’t been paying attention, Vantor has been having quite the week across the pond. In the space of a week, the spatial intelligence company has announced a partnership with Rheinmetall to create “a European 3D information platform for spatial intelligence,” and teamed up with British prime BAE Systems to manufacture its 20 […]
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 […]
