Latest Stories
Exclusive: Petrel Technologies Flies Out of Stealth
It’s been a big last few years for small, inexpensive drones (and the companies that build them), but larger platforms have remained pretty firmly in the realm of the expensive and exquisite. Today, in an exclusive release to Tectonic, Florida-based Petrel Technologies emerged from stealth to change that. The startup is building a low-cost, Group […]
Second Front and Valarian Team Up
The mash-ups continue. This morning, Second Front Systems (2F) and UK-based Valarian announced a strategic partnership to pair up Second Front’s government-facing commercial tech adoption software with Valarian’s sovereignty-focused data infrastructure to build a “new generation of sovereign-by-design digital solutions with controlled deployment pathways, compartmentalized environments, and audit-first infrastructure.” For the illiterate among us—basically, the […]
Constellr Raises $44M Series A
We may have just announced the Payload X Tectonic mashup at our summit in March, but we ain’t done talking about space-y defense-y stuff yet. This morning, German thermal intelligence company constellr announced that it’s raised a €37M ($44M) Series A led by Alpine Space Ventures and Lakestar. The company says it will use the […]
The UK Enters the Dragon’s Den
Well, the UK is (kind of) putting its money where its mouth is? At the very least, they’ve got an all-star on their naming committee. On Friday, the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) announced that they’d officially carried out their first-ever “Dragon’s Den” style competition, where ten defense and dual-use startups (per the MoD) pitched […]
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 […]
