defense technology

Why Eric Slesinger, a former CIA officer, is now funding European defense tech

Venture /

This week on StrictlyVC Download, Strictly VC’s Alex Gove speaks with Eric Slesinger from 201 Ventures, a firm focused on seed-stage defense tech startups in Europe. They discuss Slesinger’s journey from CIA to investor and how he recognized the untapped potential in European defense tech while others were dismissive. They also chat about how he’s […]

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Mach Industries, founded by 21-year-old Ethan Thornton, lands US Army contract, builds weapons factory

Startups /

Sequoia-backed Mach Industries, the defense tech founded by 21-year-old Ethan Thornton, landed a contract with the U.S. Army and has plans for its first factory, Thornton told TechCrunch. The factory will be 115,000 square feet in Huntington Beach, California, where Mach’s headquarters is located, CEO Thorton said. While that sounds like an expensive zip code

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YC grad Deepnight nabs $5.5M for AI night vision software that disrupts a multi-billion dollar industry

Startups /

Deepnight co-founders Lucas Young and Thomas Li have been friends since childhood. Both were working as software engineers at Google when Young decided he wanted to crack the code, so to speak, on a problem that had plagued the U.S. military for decades: digital night vision tech. Most night vision technology is still analog. Goggles

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Defense and resilience tech reached an all-time high 10% of all VC funding in Europe

Venture /

The war in Ukraine served as a wakeup call for Europe, and defense tech went from a sector that most European VCs didn’t touch to one of the top investment areas within deep tech. This shift is captured in Dealroom’s latest report on Defence, Resilience, and Security (DSR) in Europe, released together with the NATO

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Anduril takes control of Microsoft’s $22B VR military headset program

Startups /

The Army has granted upstart weapons maker Anduril control of one of its highest-profile and long-troubled projects known as the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, founder Palmer Luckey announced in a blog post Tuesday. IVAS was initially awarded to Microsoft in 2018 to develop augmented reality headsets for soldiers based on a ruggedized version of Hololens.

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Andrew Ng is ‘very glad’ Google dropped its AI weapons pledge

Government & Policy /

Andrew Ng, the founder and former leader of Google Brain, supports Google’s recent decision to drop its pledge not to build AI systems for weapons. “I’m very glad that Google has changed its stance,” Ng said during an on-stage interview Thursday evening with TechCrunch at the Military Veteran Startup Conference in San Francisco. Earlier this

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Lydian can make aviation fuel wherever there’s CO2 and electricity

Climate /

Jet fuel is a modern wonder, allowing commercial airplanes to carry hundreds of passengers halfway around the world and military aircraft to regularly break the speed of sound. Yet jet fuel as we know it might be on the chopping block as the world strives to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions. Commercial aviation is responsible for

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More ex-military officials are becoming VCs as defense tech investment reached $35 billion

Venture /

The distance between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon just keeps getting smaller. As venture capitalists continue to pour money into defense tech startups, they’re turning to a new hiring pool: veterans and ex-Department of Defense officials.   Andreessen Horowitz hired Matt Shortal, an ex-fighter jet pilot, as its chief of staff; Lux Capital brought on Tony

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