Latest Stories
Shield AI Tapped for COCO ISR
Our friends over at Shield AI are having quite the start to the year. Yesterday, the San Diego-based autonomy giant announced that it’s been tapped by the US Navy to compete for $800M in ISR services with its VTOL V-BAT drone. AV—FKA AeroVironment—also announced that it had been selected to compete for the contractor-owned, contractor-operated […]
Exclusive: KBR Taps Tagup’s Logistics AI Platform
Tag, you’re it! In an exclusive release in Tectonic this morning, big-time prime KBR announced that it’s tapped Tagup’s AI-powered defense logistics software to bring some startup spice to its “global logistics mission sets,” starting off with ground equipment maintenance and logistics planning operations. In 2026, the unsexy side of defense is turning out to […]
Saildrone Unveils Spectre, Built with Lockheed Martin
By the look of things, it’s going to be a busy, busy week out in National Harbor. This morning, USV darling Saildrone announced at Sea-Air-Space that they’re building a new, 52-meter (170-foot) USV called Spectre, the “largest, fastest, and most capable Saildrone platform to date,” according to the company. The big ol’ drone boat is […]
Exclusive: Tocaro Blue Unveils ApolloCore
It’s Sea Air Space week, baby, and the news is already coming in hot and fast. This morning, maritime perception company Tocaro Blue (you’ll remember them from their team-up with Havoc AI) unveiled ApolloCore, a new camera-based machine learning software, in an exclusive release to Tectonic. The stack—designed to work with the company’s ProteusCore radar […]
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 […]
