Latest Stories
Touchwaves Partners with GA for Haptic Drone Comms
Well, for all of you drone pilots out there sick of just using traditional controllers, boy, do we have some good news for you. This morning, Amsterdam-based startup Touchwaves announced in an exclusive interview with Tectonic that they’re teaming up with General Atomics to bring their wearable haptic tech to MQ-9 Reaper pilots. GA also […]
Hand-Launched Interceptor Startup Askari Raises $9M Seed
Frying them with microwaves, shooting them down with robo-machine guns, jamming them—counter-UAS companies keep rolling out a growing and creative array of ways to take down drones. Askari has a different take on it. Rather than building vehicle-based or fixed-site air defense systems, the Atlanta-based startup wants to—quite literally—put interceptors into the hands of frontline […]
Harmattan Scores 5,000-Drone Follow-On Order from France
Just because Eurosatory is over certainly doesn’t mean our friends across the pond are slowing things down. Yesterday, French autonomy startup Harmattan AI announced that the French government has ordered another 5,000 of its Sonora ISR drones, just a year after ordering a first tranche of 1,000. That first batch—part of a program of record […]
STARK Raises €500M at €3.5B Valuation
If you think the defense tech scene is hot in the US, take a look across the pond. Yesterday, German drone startup STARK quietly announced a very chill €500M ($567M) fundraising round led by longtime (in defense startup terms) backers Founders Fund and Sequoia Capital. The two-year-old company told Tectonic that the round put its […]
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 […]
