Latest Stories
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 […]
ICYMI: Pentagon Announces Drone Dominance Vendors
If you’re looking for something to cure your post-Super Bowl blues, the Department of Defense has you covered. Last week, the Pentagon revealed the 25 vendors selected to face off in the first phase of the Drone Dominance Program (DDP), the department’s $1.1B initiative to buy up tons of low-cost UAVs for the Army, and […]
Meet Seeing Systems, Y Combinator’s Newest Drone Startup
Remember when Y Combinator startups made food delivery and crypto apps? Well, times they have a-changed. This week, a new startup called Seeing Systems emerged out of the famed accelerator’s 2026 winter cohort, and they’re definitely not making widgets. The UK-based team—founded by two brothers—is building autonomous strike drones, and they’re already seeing early traction […]
Firestorm and Orqa Team Up
Look out, world. The defense tech bros are teaming up across the Atlantic. Yesterday, Croatian drone wunderkind and California-based drone and additive manufacturing company Firestorm announced that they’re officially teaming up to 3D print Orqa’s teeny-tiny FPVs for frontline operators. According to Firestorm CEO Dan Magy and Orqa CEO Srdjan Kovacevic, both companies and customers […]
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 […]
