American Hardtech

Daily brief on US hardtech: defense, space, energy, chips, manufacturing, and more. Weekday briefs + Saturday roundup. Tips: dm or [email protected]

[American Hardtech @AmHardtech]

American Hardtech is the daily pulse of the industrial rebuild.

- Weekday: short hardtech briefs here on X.
- Saturday: weekly roundup delivered to your inbox. Sign up at: https://t.co/v4did8oS9G

Covering defense, space, energy, robotics, maritime, chips, manufacturing, and more + Allied hardtech (Five Eyes, NATO, partners).

Building, backing, or watching it? Follow + subscribe. Tips / guest ideas welcome via DM, or email me at [email protected].

[American Hardtech @AmHardtech]

@PhilipJohnston @SpaceX 😳

[American Hardtech @AmHardtech]

@_filmcrave We need the glasses guy too!

[American Hardtech @AmHardtech]

@EkoLovesYou @grok @PalmerLuckey @eliano @JensenHuang Nice 🇺🇸

[American Hardtech @AmHardtech]

Here's today's hardtech brief!

U.S. HARDTECH:
- Aventra raised a $17.5M Series A led by Konvoy Ventures for Piranha, a kit that turns ordinary bombs into guided gliders dropped from balloons at 60k feet. With 400+ flights in under a year, CEO Michael Weigand's pitch is that "stratospheric winds carrying mass downrange without fuel get you much more range."

- Schneider Electric agreed to acquire Boston's PTC for $22.6B, a premium of more than 40%. PTC's design and product-lifecycle software runs through U.S. aerospace and auto manufacturing, and the deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2027.

- The Energy Department offered Vistra a conditional $4.2B loan to squeeze 433 MW more out of three nuclear plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania and keep about 4 GW running another 20 years. These "uprates" are the fastest way to add nuclear power, and Meta has already signed to buy the extra output. @VistraCorp

- Colorado's Ursa Major won $137M from the Navy for solid rocket motors, including $91M for a 7-inch motor for a new compact air-to-air missile. Solid rocket motors are currently a major bottleneck in missile production and Ursa Major builds them partly with 3D printing. @ursamajortech

- Northrop Grumman's Talon Blue drone wingman made its first flight, fully autonomously, out of Mojave. Northrop paid for it itself after missing the Air Force's first round of drone wingmen, which went to General Atomics and Anduril. Talon Blue is now aimed at the much larger second round.

- Palo Alto's SafeWorld came out of stealth with a $12M seed co-led by Shine Capital and a16z Speedrun to safety-test robots in simulation against realistic digital humans. Co-founder Ding Zhao runs Carnegie Mellon's Safe AI Lab.

- Linse Capital, the growth investor behind SpaceX, Skydio, and Impulse Space, disclosed a $75M early-stage fund plus $75M for co-investments in defense supply chain, in-space manufacturing, chipmaking, and fusion. It's mostly deployed already, in companies like Varda, Amca, and Thea Energy, a sign that growth investors are moving earlier to get access.

- Elon Musk confirmed talks with TSMC about his planned Terafab chip factory: "Just discussions, but something may come of it." Tech columnist Tim Culpan, who broke the story, says the most likely outcome is TSMC owning and operating the plant.

- The Army has downed 11 cartel drones with lasers on the Mexican border since August, while testing systems from Anduril, Teledyne FLIR, Austin's Allen Control Systems, and Powerus. Separately, Powerus landed an $82M Air Force order for its Guardian-2 interceptor drones.

- MISO, the grid operator for much of the Midwest, asked federal regulators to approve a 120-day fast track for new loads over 200 MW that bring their own power plants. If approved starting in early 2027, data centers and factories that build their own generation could connect in months instead of years.

ALLIED HARDTECH:
- European defense startups are on track to raise $10.5B this year, four times last year, according to Dealroom and Resilience Media, cutting the U.S. share of NATO-wide defense startup funding to 75%. Bessemer's Alex Ferrara says both sides share one problem: exits, because defense has only a small number of strategic acquirers.

- Oxford's Living Optics raised $20M led by BRV Capital, adding Lockheed Martin Ventures and the venture arms of chip-equipment makers Applied Materials and Lam Research. Its hyperspectral cameras, which see far more bands of light than a normal camera, target defense and industrial inspection. @LivingOptics

- Cardiff's Reclinker raised a £10M Series A to turn cement from demolished buildings back into clinker, cement's key ingredient, inside the electric arc furnaces steelmakers already run. It says the process cuts emissions about 50% at no extra cost and plans to expand to steel sites in Europe and the U.S.

Follow for more hardtech news!

[American Hardtech @AmHardtech]

@geoffwoo

[American Hardtech @AmHardtech]

@TaylorCSargent 🇺🇸

[American Hardtech @AmHardtech]

Here's your hardtech weekly roundup!

U.S. HARDTECH:
- Austin's Saronic won 10 of the Navy's first 30 medium drone ships, then broke ground on Port Alpha, its privately funded Brownsville shipyard. Elsewhere in maritime, Quartermaster raised a $100M Series B and Anduril bought underwater modem maker Popoto.

- El Segundo's Varda raised a $251M Series D at a $1.6B valuation, then flew two capsules on one rocket for the first time. Neighbor Charter Space raised a $5M seed to insure satellites so their owners can borrow against them. @VardaSpace

- The Pentagon reorganized around drones and robots. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced a four-star Autonomous Warfare Command. DIU director Owen West moved to run a new unmanned systems buying office that reports directly to Hegseth. And the Army created its own autonomy command, with autonomous fires, combat vehicles, and resupply due by fiscal 2028.

- SpaceX's Starship reached orbit for the first time and deployed 26 Starlink satellites, its first paying payload, before returning early. SpaceX then flew three missions in under 13 hours, including a rideshare carrying Starfish Space's first full-size Otter and Google's AI chip test satellite.

- Raytheon landed back-to-back multiyear missile deals worth up to $20.7B for AMRAAM and $24.4B for SM-6. The Pentagon also opened $4.15B in counter-drone contracts to 10 companies, including Austin's Allen Control Systems. Congress hasn't funded the full multiyears yet, and industry warns suppliers may hold off on new capacity until it does.

- The Army picked Torrance's Castelion and Huntington Beach's Mach Industries to compete with Lockheed, RTX, and Anduril on a 1,000 km ship-killing missile for HIMARS. Two missile makers only a few years old are now competing for a formal Army weapons program.

- Boeing beat Northrop for the Navy's F/A-XX sixth-generation fighter, a development deal worth more than $20B. Boeing now holds both of America's next-generation fighter programs.

- The NRC issued the first U.S. construction permit for a small modular reactor, TVA's BWRX-300 at Clinch River, four months early. LA-based Valar Atomics applied to build a 9.6 GW nuclear data center campus in Utah. And Hegseth ordered major bases to generate their own power, starting with an Air Force microreactor in Alaska by 2028. @valaratomics

- Who pays for the factories became the week's big question. A Bain and AIA report found private investors put $7 into new defense companies for every $1 of government production money. a16z general partner Connor Love and Collen Larson called rebuilding the defense industrial base "one of the defining investment opportunities of the next decade." And Pentagon CFO Jules Hurst warned that many startups are still "paper deep" and need to have a path that viably considers manufacturing.

- Blackstone launched Falcata by combining interceptor guidance makers TSC and ASEI, with Bloomberg reporting more than $1B committed. Blackstone's David Kaden named interceptor navigation and guidance as one of the costliest choke points in missile defense.

- Houston-area Hertha Metals raised a $133.65M Series A led by Khosla Ventures and Doerr Capital, with the federal government putting in $65M of equity. It's building a plant to make high-purity iron for steel and rare earth magnets.

- Bay Area AI hardware drew big checks. SF's Volantis raised an $88M Series A to link chips to memory with light, and Palo Alto's CScale came out of stealth with $145M for optical links between server racks. SF's Flow Engineering raised $50M at a $750M valuation for hardware design software used by Anduril and Stoke.

- San Diego's Shield AI picked Des Moines, Washington, for its X-BAT AI fighter jet factory. Days earlier, Stoke CEO Andy Lapsa and Sophia Space's Brian Monnin warned that Washington is losing hardtech factories to states that recruit harder. @shieldaitech

- Ken Griffin gave Carnegie Mellon $3B, the largest gift ever to a university, including $2B for a new Miami campus. Two of its four focus areas are national security and advanced manufacturing.

- Iowa approved about $1.4B in tax credits for Mesabi Metallics' $15B steel mill in Lee County, and Gov. Kim Reynolds signed the bill Friday night, five days after President Trump announced the project. There were concerns raised about the deal, ranging from anxieties over Mesabi's foreign ownership (India) to State Senator Dan Dawson calling it the "largest corporate giveaway in the state of Iowa's history."

- The FCC voted 2-1 to stop treating satellite launches and operations as triggers for environmental review. A bipartisan Senate group released a permitting bill that limits lawsuits and lets federal regulators approve stalled power lines, with a vote expected after the midterms.

ALLIED HARDTECH:
- South Korea committed up to $120B to build eight large reactors in the U.S., plus a minority stake in Westinghouse. The terms are non-binding, but a $10B advance would let suppliers start ordering parts that take years to build.

- Sweden's Stegra found its first-of-a-kind green steel plant will cost well above plan and named former Saab CEO Håkan Buskhe to replace its founder-CEO.

- Germany's Reverion raised a €154.2M Series B led by Kembara to build a fuel-cell power plant megafactory and grow from about 200 to 800 staff, as European climate money turns to powering data centers.

- Canada Rocket Company is building the country's first large rocket engine test site in London, Ontario. Meanwhile, Scotland's Skyrora pushed its first orbital launch to 2030, citing cooling UK appetite for homegrown rockets.

- London's Foundational came out of stealth with an £8.2M pre-seed to pin satellite positions to the millimeter by bouncing lasers off small reflectors.

That's the week! Sign up for the newsletter if you want to get this in your inbox. Have a great rest of your weekend and see you on Monday with the daily brief!

[American Hardtech @AmHardtech]

@elonmusk The pez dispenser in action! 🇺🇸

[American Hardtech @AmHardtech]

@bscholl The Hawaiian shirt is still on! The Anduril cooking continues 💪🇺🇸

[American Hardtech @AmHardtech]

@PalmerLuckey @boltondynamics

[American Hardtech @AmHardtech]

@seanf1orez Thanks a ton, bud!

[American Hardtech @AmHardtech]

Big news out of Miami & Pittsburgh:

Ken Griffin has pledged $3B to Carnegie Mellon, the largest gift ever made to a university. Of that, $2B will build CMU Miami, a new 35-acre campus in Wynwood, and $1B goes to CMU's Pittsburgh campus, including its computer science school, now named for Griffin.

CMU Miami will be organized around four challenge areas instead of traditional departments: national security and strategic capabilities, advanced manufacturing and industrial transformation, energy and climate resilience, and human health.

Griffin said: "Great American cities are anchored by great universities, with almost no exception." He makes a strong point. MIT anchors Cambridge. Stanford anchors the Bay Area. CMU's robotics labs turned Pittsburgh into a self-driving and autonomy hub. The talent and the spinouts come out of the labs. CMU Miami fills this void for Miami. As a Miami native (I'm counting Boca Raton as Miami, sue me), Griffin envisions a home for talent that enables young people to grow up, study in, and work and/or build ventures in the area. The top tier university was the missing piece.

Miami also has a head start on defense: U.S. Southern Command is headquartered next door in Doral, and the Space Coast is a few hours up I-95.

Construction begins in 2027, with the first graduate students as early as 2028.

Lots of folks in the tech community have been talking for almost a decade about Miami becoming the next major American tech hub. This is the adrenaline shot the city has been waiting for. Now, it needs to capitalize on the opportunity and the coming momentum.

[American Hardtech @AmHardtech]

@BalaSelvam Many such cases, unfortunately.

[American Hardtech @AmHardtech]

Here's today's hardtech brief!

U.S. HARDTECH:
- Anduril acquired Popoto, a Massachusetts maker of underwater acoustic modems already inside Anduril's Copperhead underwater drone. Radio doesn't work underwater, so subsea drones talk with sound. The deal reflects that new defense primes are now buying smaller suppliers they depend on. @anduriltech

- The Navy and DIU named Vatn Systems (Bristol, Rhode Island) and BlackSea Technologies (Baltimore) among the winners of a mine-hunting drone challenge that went from open call to contract options in under four months. Maritime is a growing venture category, with nearly $3B into marine startups over the past year, per Crunchbase. Disclosure: I work in the maritime defense vertical, though not for the companies mentioned here.

- In an essay on a16z's website, general partner Connor Love and Collen Larson call rebuilding America's defense industrial base "one of the defining investment opportunities of the next decade." His case: defense startups have outrun the small, underinvested shops that supply the big contractors, and fixing that takes modernizing those suppliers, firm Pentagon orders, and capital that shifts from venture to private equity and debt as factories scale. @ConnorLoveCA

- SpaceX flew three missions in under 13 hours, including the National Reconnaissance Office's first Falcon Heavy and the 130-payload Transporter-18 rideshare. Transporter carried Seattle-area Starfish Space's first full-size Otter, which will inspect dead satellites for NASA, and two El Segundo Varda capsules testing heat shields and navigation for hypersonic flight.

- Google's Project Suncatcher prototype is in orbit and working, testing whether its TPU AI chips can survive in space. Google's own research says space data centers need launch at about $200/kg by 2035, or roughly 1,800 Starship flights in a decade, while San Carlos's Cowboy Space launched a satellite to test beaming power to Earth by laser.

- Raytheon won an SM-6 interceptor deal worth up to $24.4B, its second giant multiyear award in a week. Multiyear deals let suppliers buy in bulk and add capacity, but Congress hasn't funded this one yet, and suppliers may hold off on factory investment until it does.

- The Pentagon's counter-drone task force is using AI agents to rank every system it tested at its Falcon Peak exercise by performance and price, cutting buying decisions from weeks to days. For vendors, test-range results now feed straight into a searchable shopping list.

- At Seattle Space Week, Sophia Space co-founder Brian Monnin said "the incentives just aren't here" as the company weighs New Mexico and Louisiana for its first factory. Coming days after Stoke CEO Andy Lapsa's similar warning, it's another sign that states are now openly competing for hardtech factories.

- Amazon pledged $1B to communities hosting its data centers as AWS CEO Matt Garman warned that more than 100 local moratoriums are under consideration. Oracle separately offered to absorb about $300M in rising costs at Wisconsin's Point Beach nuclear plant, a sign the fight over AI's power demand has moved into local politics.

ALLIED HARDTECH:
- Scotland's Skyrora pushed its first orbital launch from late 2026 to 2030, citing cooling UK appetite for homegrown rockets and limited pad space at the SaxaVord spaceport. It has raised about $66M, roughly half what it needs to reach orbit, and is selling components, test time, and 3D printing in the meantime.

- Québec City's Femtum opened a cleanroom factory six times the size of its old incubator space to build lasers chipmakers use on silicon photonics chips for AI data centers. It has about 40 staff and plans to pass 50 by 2027.

- Japan's BULL won ¥260M in government funding to mass-produce HORN, a fan-shaped sail that unfurls on dead satellites and rocket stages so drag pulls them out of orbit instead of leaving debris.

Follow for more hardtech news and have a great weekend! I'll send out my weekly roundup tomorrow, so sign up for our newsletter if you want it in your inbox.

[American Hardtech @AmHardtech]

@shaunmmaguire This is the way.

[American Hardtech @AmHardtech]

Here's today's hardtech brief!

U.S. HARDTECH:
- Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced an Autonomous Warfare Command, a new four-star command for drones and robotics. Until it stands up next October, DIU director Owen West and Navy SEAL Senior Chief Max Strasiser will run an interim version called Project Agincourt. For autonomy startups, that means a dedicated buyer built to push "decisions and dollars" closer to frontline units, though Congress still has to approve the command. Hegseth also tapped Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, Newt Gingrich, and Pentagon CTO Emil Michael to lead a 120-day study of future warfare.

- Hegseth also ordered every major U.S. base to generate its own power, independent of the civilian grid, and the Air Force is targeting a working microreactor at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska by September 2028. Base energy is now one of the clearest demand signals yet for microreactor, storage, and microgrid companies.

- Y Combinator hosted its Startup Industrial Base event for defense tech founders on Wednesday, the latest sign that the startup accelerator is leaning into hardtech. YC's current Requests for Startups includes one written by now former Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who asked founders to build low-cost interceptors, drones, sensors, and advanced manufacturing for ground combat. @ycombinator

- Speaking at the event, Pentagon CFO Jules Hurst told founders that troops liking your product isn't enough, because program offices control the budgets and set them a year and a half in advance. His blunt read is that many defense startups are "paper deep," which he called "kind of a risky bet for the government," so the companies that win will be the ones that prove they can manufacture. @JulesHurstIII

- SF's Volantis raised an $88M Series A co-led by Lachy Groom and Abstract Ventures to link AI chips to memory with light. It's attacking the "memory wall," where AI models are held back by how fast data moves to and from memory rather than how fast chips compute. The team comes from Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, and Ayar Labs, and its first systems ship in 2027.

- Austin's Saronic broke ground on Port Alpha, a privately funded shipyard in Brownsville, Texas, with Vice President JD Vance and Gov. Greg Abbott on hand. Saronic says the yard will more than double U.S. commercial shipbuilding capacity at launch, building both autonomous and crewed vessels.

- Sunnyvale's Satlyt raised an $8M seed led by Houston's Non Sibi Ventures for software that runs AI models across many companies' satellites instead of beaming raw data down to Earth. Founder Rama Afullo pitched the idea inside both Google and SpaceX and was turned down. His framing: "if they are the iPhone, we'll build Android as a horizontally integrated, open ecosystem." @satlytai

- Micron is raising spending, mostly to build new cleanrooms, and has already sold the vast majority of its 2027 HBM, the stacked memory inside AI chips, at significantly higher prices. Its first Idaho fab starts output in mid-2027 and its first New York fab in 2030, and management says it has no "line of sight" to when memory supply catches up with demand.

- Nuclear startups have raised more than $6B so far this year, already a record, according to Crunchbase News. Public investors are cooler: X-energy is down about half since its April IPO and Oklo is down about two-thirds from its peak. That gap will shape how late-stage nuclear companies eventually go public.

- The FCC voted 2-1 to stop treating satellite launches and operations as triggers for environmental review, closing a route that rivals and astronomers have used to demand reviews of megaconstellations. Commissioner Anna Gomez dissented in part, and the FAA's own environmental review of launches still applies.

- A bipartisan Senate group released the text of its permitting bill. It would give opponents 150 days to sue over a project, make courts send flawed permits back for fixes instead of canceling them, and let federal regulators approve interstate power lines that states sit on for more than a year. No vote is coming until after the midterms, but the bill goes straight at the lawsuits that can stall a plant or power line for years.

ALLIED HARDTECH:
- South Korea committed up to $120B to build eight large reactors in the U.S.: six Westinghouse AP1000s and two Korean APR1400s. The deal includes $10B upfront for long-lead equipment and a Korean minority stake in Westinghouse. The terms are still non-binding, but the advance would let suppliers start ordering the parts that take years to build.

- London's Foundational came out of stealth with an £8.2M pre-seed from investors including Inflection, BACKED, and Type One Ventures. It bounces lasers off small reflectors on satellites to pin their positions to the millimeter. Founder Hira Virdee, who previously founded Lumi Space, says the technique has been too costly and complex to use at scale, and the company aims to sell it as a service.

- Ontario's Canada Rocket Company is building Canada's first large-scale rocket engine test site, a C$30M facility in London, Ontario, that can test engines with more than 1 meganewton of thrust. Until now, Canadian teams working at that scale had to test abroad. The site should be operational in 2028.

- Montreal's OSCP closed a Series A led by New Science Ventures for light-based gyroscopes and motion sensors that keep vehicles navigating when GPS is jammed or spoofed. CEO Kazem Zandi notes that jamming used to be a battlefield problem and now shows up over airports and shipping lanes, so its market is spilling well beyond defense.

Follow for more daily hardtech news!

[American Hardtech @AmHardtech]

🫡 🇺🇸

[Lucas Crupi @lucas_crupi]

Created my first 10 American manufacturing jobs this month 🇺🇸

[American Hardtech @AmHardtech]

@ryanameliab 😂

[American Hardtech @AmHardtech]

@omooretweets 😂😅

[American Hardtech @AmHardtech]

@reynoir_will Thank you, kind sir! Love hearing the latest from you about Louisiana and Austin

[American Hardtech @AmHardtech]

Here's today's hardtech brief!

U.S. HARDTECH:
- Discipulus Ventures named its newest cohort of founders building for "the American interest." The fund writes $175k checks and moves each team into a two-week residency in El Segundo that ends with a demo day for more than 100 investors. @DiscipulusVent

- Varda raised a $251M Series D at a $1.6B valuation, led by Lux Capital and Natural Capital, to fly its drug-making capsules more often. Varda uses microgravity to make drug crystal forms that are hard to produce on Earth, and it has brought six capsules back from orbit since 2023 as it works toward delivering the first medicine made in space. @VardaSpace

- Boeing beat Northrop Grumman for the Navy's F/A-XX, the sixth-generation fighter that will replace the Super Hornet on carriers in the 2030s, in a development contract worth more than $20B. Boeing now holds both of America's next-generation fighter programs, the Air Force's F-47 and the Navy's F/A-XX, which ends more than a year of Pentagon doubt about whether industry could build both at once.

- San Diego's Shield AI picked Des Moines, Washington, south of Seattle, to build X-BAT, its AI-piloted fighter jet that doesn't need a runway, in a 420k sq ft plant expected to employ 4k people by the early 2030s. Every jet will be flight tested in Newton, Kansas, and the company says it chose Washington to tap the region's existing aerospace workforce instead of training one from scratch.

- The Army picked two LA-area startups, Castelion (Torrance) and Mach Industries (Huntington Beach), to compete with Lockheed Martin, RTX, and Anduril on a missile that can hit moving ships 1,000 km away when fired from the HIMARS truck launcher. It's a prototype fly-off, not a production award, but it puts two missile makers that are only a few years old up against the primes on a formal Army weapons program.

- The Pentagon's counter-drone task force awarded 10 contracts with a combined $4.15B ceiling, including $500M slots for Austin's Allen Control Systems and Australia's DroneShield. Only about $50M is committed so far, but task force director Brig. Gen. Matt Ross says these open-ended ordering contracts, called IDIQs, are the point: "A large IDIQ contract will allow companies to raise additional capital to build up their inventory because they have a reasonable expectation that we're going to continue to partner with them."

- The Navy ordered 30 medium drone ships for about $1.2B, split evenly between Austin's Saronic, HII, and Louisiana's Galliano Marine. It's the first production order for a program the Navy has chased for years, and all 30 ships will come from small Louisiana yards rather than the big naval shipbuilders.

- LA-based Valar Atomics applied to build "Project Beehive," a 9.6 GW nuclear-powered data center campus on federal land near Price, Utah, using about 456 small reactors. The Bureau of Land Management says it is only checking whether the application is complete, so this is the start of a long environmental review, not an approval.

- Valor Equity Partners and Gavin Baker's Atreides co-led two Bay Area rounds on the same morning: a $50M Series B at a $750M valuation for SF's Flow Engineering, whose hardware design software is used by Anduril, Stoke, and Radiant, and a $145M Series C for Palo Alto's CScale, which came out of stealth building optical links that keep AI chips talking across server racks.

- El Segundo's Charter Space raised a $5M seed led by Crystal Venture Partners for its space and defense insurance brokerage, which already serves more than 50 companies. Once a satellite can be insured, its owner can borrow against it instead of relying only on venture money. @charter_space_

ALLIED HARDTECH:

- Sweden's Stegra said a review by its new owners found the cost to finish its first-of-a-kind green steel plant in Boden is well above plan, and it named former Saab CEO Håkan Buskhe to replace founder-CEO Henrik Henriksson on Nov 1.

- Saskatchewan set a goal of 2,600 MW of nuclear power by 2050: two large reactors in the province's northwest, the first by 2042, plus a 600 MW small modular reactor site near Estevan. No vendor has been picked, which sets up a contest between Westinghouse's AP1000 and AtkinsRéalis's Candu design.

- London's Zenithon AI raised a $10M seed from investors including Backed VC, Lunar Ventures, and Seraphim to build AI "world models" of extreme physics for fusion, rockets, and chipmaking.

- Paris-based Inbolt raised $12.5M led by Shift4Good for 3D vision that lets factory robots of any major brand see and adapt to parts in real time, and it already runs in more than 100 factories for Ford, Stellantis, and Toyota. The money funds its U.S. expansion out of a new Detroit office.

Follow for more hardtech news!