Sponsored
Featured
Navy Issues RFI for its CCA Program
The Navy wants prototypes that cost less than $30M and can operate “directly from the sea."
Tectonic in your inbox
Get daily insights on the most important news impacting defense innovation.
The Space & Defense Investor Summit
Recent Stories
Drone-Maker Easy Aerial Plans Production Boost and New Products After $20M Series B
The drone dollars just keep on coming. On Monday, Easy Aerial, a Brooklyn-based manufacturer of defense-focused tethered drones, announced a $20M Series B—led by VC giant Insight Partners—to boost production and deliveries, as well as roll out new products. In the green: Now, if you’ve been keeping up with the defense-tech world, you’ll know that […]
Heaviside Wins $99M US Army IDIQ for Body-Worn Drone Detector
A few short weeks after raising a $60M Series B at a $600M valuation, Heaviside is showing no signs of slowing down. Late last week, the California-based super-stealthy, precision-munitions company was awarded a five-year, $99M IDIQ contract with the US Army, but it wasn’t for the tech you might expect from a go-boom startup. Instead, […]
Pentagon Invests $135M in Alumina, Critical Minerals
Never really thought we’d be writing about mining and refining as we’re a defense publication and all, but here we are. On Friday, the Pentagon announced two mega investments in yet more domestic critical minerals supply: “To build a robust defense-industrial base, we must secure the foundational materials that enable it,” Assistant Secretary of War […]
The Pod
Valley of Depth is a podcast about the technologies that matter – and the people building them.
Investment
Tech
Big Conversations
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 […]