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: americanhardtech.com 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 info@americanhardtech.com.

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Here's today's hardtech brief! U.S. HARDTECH: - Fervo brought Cape Station in Utah to first power, the first enhanced geothermal plant anywhere to reach the grid. The technique fractures hot, dry rock and circulates water through it, which frees geothermal from the few places with natural underground reservoirs. @fervoenergy - PicoJool, backed by former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, raised a $27.5M Series A for laser chips that link AI processors with light instead of copper. In big AI clusters the bottleneck is increasingly the connections between GPUs, not the GPUs themselves. - DensityAI, founded by the team behind Tesla's shuttered Dojo supercomputer, is reportedly valued at $10B with an AWS purchase deal already signed. Its chip stacks memory directly on the processor, attacking the same data bottleneck as PicoJool. - House Science leaders from both parties introduced a $10B fusion bill, including $2B paid out only when companies hit technical milestones. That's the same model NASA used to fund commercial cargo to the space station. - Nexterity, founded by a former ExxonMobil engineer, built a case-sized robot that tightens four pipe-flange bolts at once. Bolting pipe is one of the most repetitive and injury-prone jobs in refineries and chemical plants. - The Navy moved all its air, surface, and undersea drone programs under one new command in Norfolk. The chief of naval operations set the bar: "The measure of success is not how many prototypes we demonstrate. It's how much combat power we can repeatedly generate, deploy, sustain, and adapt." - Austin's Deep Tech Week ran as a factory crawl instead of a conference, with Subcritical, Galadyne, Bravo Ordnance, TerraFirma, and BSU Electronics opening their floors and a closing party at microreactor maker Aalo Atomics. - Varda, the El Segundo company that brings manufacturing capsules back from orbit, hired Lockheed's former head of hypersonic strike programs as chief revenue officer. Its capsules re-enter at hypersonic speed, which has made them a test platform for the Air Force. @VardaSpace - Physical Intelligence, the San Francisco company building AI models for robots, leased 233k square feet in Mountain View for its first large facility. @physical_int ALLIED HARDTECH: - Sweden's Refinyx came out of stealth after buying Northvolt's battery recycling technology out of its collapse. - Montreal's Axya raised a C$17M Series A for AI that runs manufacturers' purchasing. For companies building complex hardware, procurement still largely happens over email and spreadsheets. - Tokyo's O-ID raised a $1.2M pre-seed for humanoid robots built from swappable modules, so a worn joint gets replaced instead of the whole machine. Japan's factory labor shortage makes it one of the first markets where humanoids have to pay for themselves. Follow for more and have a great weekend!

Here's today's hardtech brief! U.S. HARDTECH: - The Space Force is telling satellite builders to prepare for roughly five times the volume within three to five years and is weighing multiyear buys to justify the factories. Its space systems chief put it as: if you nominally make ten, be ready to make forty. - Oracle filed a force majeure notice on Project Jupiter, the 2.45GW Stargate campus in New Mexico, after the gas pipeline feeding it slipped to February 2027 and an air permit for its fuel cells stayed pending. The campus was designed to run on its own gas rather than the grid. - The Navy added $876M to L3Harris for the Next Generation Jammer Low Band, the pod on the EA-18G Growler that blinds the long-wavelength radars used for early warning. - Two GPS-denied navigation companies raised on the same morning, both in Colorado. Mesa Quantum took $11.8M led by Playground Global for chip-scale atomic clocks and accelerometers, and Locus Lock raised a strategic round with In-Q-Tel for software-defined satellite navigation receivers. - The Navy opened the second phase of its medium unmanned surface vessel marketplace, a site where authorized buyers across the department can issue funded orders directly instead of running new competitions. Entries need ten days of autonomous open-ocean operation and room for 48 tonnes of containerized payload. - Feather Robotics came out of stealth in San Francisco with a $7.6M pre-seed led by Gradient, selling a $30k modular humanoid that developers bring their own AI models to. It claims over $1M in revenue already, with robots working as cooks in Japanese restaurants. @featherrobotics - The Coast Guard stood up an Office of Robotics and Autonomous Forces and created an enlisted Robotics Mission Specialist rating. A rating is a permanent career track with its own training and promotion ladder, which is a much bigger institutional commitment than an office. - Allen Control Systems, the Austin company behind the Bullfrog autonomous gun turret, is opening a 16k square foot engineering office near Mountain View and hiring 35 to 50 engineers. Its cofounder said Silicon Valley was the natural choice for robotics talent, which is a useful signal that Austin is winning factories faster than it's winning autonomy engineers. @allencontrol - Prime Minute came out of stealth in Palo Alto with a $15M pre-seed led by Eclipse with 8VC, pointing defense-grade autonomy at wildfire suppression that works at night and in high wind, when conventional air tankers are grounded. The team comes out of Palantir and Forterra, and Colorado gets prototypes later this year. - Zero Infinity Partners closed a $156M second fund on an explicit reindustrialization thesis, naming metal midstream and aviation infrastructure among its targets. The bench comes out of Glencore, Stonepeak, and Antin rather than software venture, which is a different kind of money entering the space. - El Segundo investor Van Espahbodi warned that defense tech has drawn tourists and FOMO, saying he has met beauty investors who now call themselves defense tech investors and pointing at ridiculous valuations for companies that have yet to produce anything. He has 25 years in aerospace and runs a fund built around SpaceX alumni moving horizontally into other physical industries. @vdadmahi ALLIED HARDTECH: - Italy signed a €3.7B contract for two DDX destroyers through Fincantieri and Leonardo's joint venture, 13,500 tonnes each, delivering 2033 and 2035. Fincantieri takes about €1.8B of the work and Leonardo about €1.7B. - Bechtel, Westinghouse, and Poland's state nuclear company agreed the main commercial terms for three AP1000 reactors on the Baltic coast, aiming at first concrete in 2028 and grid connection in 2036. Roughly a billion zloty has already gone to Polish suppliers. - The Netherlands signed a letter of intent with Australia's Electro Optic Systems for the Apollo 100kW counter-drone laser, and is formally studying whether to build it domestically with a Dutch supply chain. Components could ship as early as mid-2027. Follow for more hardtechy goodness!

Here's today's hardtech brief! U.S. HARDTECH: - Hanwha Defense USA is putting $2.2B into a munitions campus on leased Army land at Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas, making 155mm propellant charges and base bleed units, the small gas generators on the back of a shell that extend its range. - Qualcomm is buying PickNik Robotics, the Boulder company behind MoveIt, the open-source software most industrial robot arms use to plan how they move. Qualcomm says it will keep MoveIt open under its existing license. - Helicon came out of stealth with a $16M seed led by AlleyCorp to build automated factories for carbon fiber parts, targeting under 15 minutes a part against hours of hand layup. It claims that takes lead times from six months to two weeks, which is the bottleneck on drone and airframe volume. - The Pentagon picked 17 companies for Phase 2.5 of its Drone Dominance Program, with vendor-run and soldier-run testing at Camp Grayling, Michigan in October. It ties to a $32M solicitation for reusable drones that drop munitions and fly home. - Northern Command's Falcon Peak counter-drone exercise is the first to require every commercial sensor and shooter to plug into Anduril's Lattice as the common backbone, and the first staged as a border scenario at Yuma. - Saildrone got four of its Voyager vessels registered under the Danish flag, the first time any Saildrone has carried a national flag. Denmark built the framework for registering crewless ships, which is what lets them operate routinely in European waters. - Hubble Network raised $200M at $1.6B to grow from six satellites to sixty by 2030, so ordinary Bluetooth chips can talk straight to orbit. It prices the connection at roughly 50 cents a chip and $4 a month. - The Air Force disclosed that its B-52 radar replacement passed the gate authorizing production in August, with the new engines clearing their own gate in June. Two test aircraft head to Boeing's San Antonio plant to receive both. ALLIED HARDTECH: - GE Vernova, Hitachi, Samsung C&T, and Poland's SGE signed a framework to deploy the BWRX-300 small reactor across Europe, 26 units in Poland and 14 across three UK sites. It's non-binding, and the first of these is already under construction in Canada. - Britain's StandardX launched with a £10M seed co-led by Vsquared and East X to build an accelerator-based isotope refinery in London, one machine doing what isotope-specific plants do now. It starts with cancer therapy isotopes and has agreements to make tritium for fusion developers. - Germany asked Washington for permission to manufacture PAC-3 interceptors at home, saying it will build every part of the Patriot value chain. That's a public request rather than a signed deal, and it follows last week's Pentagon agreement to expand shared production. That's today! Follow if you're awesome.

Here's today's hardtech brief! U.S. HARDTECH: - Boston Dynamics opened a permanent Atlas training facility inside Hyundai's car plant near Savannah, using real parts and workcells to generate behavior data for the humanoid. Hyundai wants 25k Atlas units across its plants and a US factory building 30k robots a year by 2028. - Samsung C&T is putting up to $100M into Kairos Power's Hermes 2 reactor at Oak Ridge, $70M in equity and the rest in engineering work. The 50MW plant is due in 2030 and counts toward the half-gigawatt Google contracted from Kairos. - SpaceX rolled the Super Heavy booster to the pad for Starship's first actual orbital attempt, targeting September 28th with 26 Starlink satellites aboard. - GlobalFoundries and Marvell signed a multi-year deal to expand silicon-germanium capacity at the Burlington, Vermont fab. That material switches fast enough to drive the optical links carrying data between AI chips, which is where the power budget is going. - L3Harris won $139M from the Navy to put low-profile masts on Virginia and Columbia class submarines, telescoping arms with high-definition and infrared cameras covering 360 degrees. They replace traditional optical periscopes. - Breakthrough Energy named its sixth Fellows cohort, 21 early-stage companies weighted toward fusion, semiconductors, and minerals. Borealis Fusion, StarWarden, K1 Semiconductor, and Mithril Minerals, which harvests seafloor minerals with robots, are among those named. ALLIED HARDTECH: - Australia's HEO raised a $25M Series B led by Beaten Zone Venture Partners to extend its satellite inspection network to geostationary orbit. It runs more than 50 cameras in space, some its own and some borrowed from partner constellations, to photograph other satellites up close. - Sweden's TERASi raised €11M co-led by the NATO Innovation Fund and In-Q-Tel for pocket-sized millimeter-wave radios that move large data volumes with no fiber and no towers. - Japan Marine United launched Akane, the first of a new landing craft class built to a British design from BMT, at its yard in Yokohama. Japan rarely adopts a foreign ship design, and these go to a new transport unit meant to supply the southwestern islands. That's today's! Follow for more.

Here's my hardtech brief for this lovely Friday: U.S. HARDTECH: - GM Defense delivered its first housings for PAC-3 interceptors, the newest long-range Patriot air defense round, 22 days after signing the contract. Work like that normally takes months, and it puts an automaker's tooling inside a munitions line Lockheed is spending $8B to $9B to expand. - The Pentagon and Lockheed signed a framework deal setting up multi-year production of the AIM-260, the long-range air-to-air missile meant to replace the AMRAAM and out-shoot China's best. Australia is the first international customer, though quantities and value weren't disclosed. - The Navy split $280.5M across Conrad Shipyard, Master Boat Builders, and Saronic to build LCU 1700 landing craft, the boats that move Marines and vehicles from ship to shore. Deliveries run 2028 to 2029, and the point is having three yards instead of one. - General Dynamics won $230M for 188 more Hammerhead mines, torpedoes in a pod that anchor to the seabed, listen for submarines, and fire when they hear a hostile one. Assembly runs through Taunton, Massachusetts and adds about 30 jobs. - The State Department cleared a $24.3B sale of 48 F-35As and 49 engines to Saudi Arabia. - The Space Force wants its ground-moving-target radar constellation on orbit within two years with Northrop, and said prototype satellites for tracking moving aircraft launch this month. The goal is doing from space what JSTARS aircraft used to do, spotting things that move rather than photographing things that sit still. - Mazama Energy raised $135M led by Centaurus and Doerr Capital for superhot rock geothermal, which fractures hot dry rock and circulates water through it where no natural reservoir exists. ConocoPhillips, Shell Ventures, and Khosla are in, aiming at 15MW per well. @mazamaenergy - Oracle contracted 1.7GW of Texas wind from RWE, Engie, Clearway, and Scout to feed its Abilene data center campus. It is one of the largest single power procurements yet tied to an AI buildout. - Rapta raised $8M co-led by Voyager and Access Venture Partners for computer vision that hands machinists real-time work instructions and verifies quality as parts move down the line. It already sells to five of the ten biggest US defense contractors. - Viabot raised a $24M Series A led by Walden International for self-charging robots that maintain commercial grounds and double as roving security sensors. Sold by subscription rather than by the unit. @ViaBotInc ALLIED HARDTECH: - Leonardo DRS will supply electric propulsion motors and drives for South Korea's KDDX destroyers, at least six ships, contracted through Doosan Enerbility. The motors are permanent magnet, so this is a rare earths story as much as a shipbuilding one. - TKMS ATLAS UK won the Royal Navy's next-generation countermeasure contract for submarine torpedo defense, covering current boats and future ones. Countermeasures here means the decoys and jammers a submarine ejects to spoof an incoming torpedo. - Belgium's TUSK IC raised €15M led by Matterwave to make Ka-band beamformer chips on standard CMOS instead of exotic semiconductors. Beamformers let a flat satellite antenna steer electronically, and their cost is the bottleneck in every low-orbit terminal. - Latvia dropped its plan to buy Swedish Archer artillery and picked the Czech Morana instead, a 155mm wheeled howitzer, citing cost, delivery timelines, and local industry work. @excaliburarmycz That's today's! Follow for more.

REINDUSTRIALIZE 🇺🇸! Well done to @fw_automation; came out great!

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Hope y'all are having a great Wednesday. Here's my hardtech brief for September 16th, 2026. U.S. HARDTECH: - The Army put $1.2 billion behind production of PrSM Increment 2, a ground-launched missile with a seeker that lets it hit moving ships from 500-plus kilometers. Work runs through 2031 in Grand Prairie, Texas. - Blue Energy filed the first construction permit application for a gas-to-nuclear plant, putting a gigawatt of gas turbines at the Port of Victoria, Texas in 2028 and reusing the same site for up to five small reactors from 2031. The MIT spinout has raised over $400 million, with Crusoe as the data center partner. @Blue_Energy_Co - Brendan McCord and Matt Mandel launched a $77.6 million Cosmos Ventures Fund I to back what they call philosopher-builders founding institutions for the AI age. McCord, then head of machine learning at DIUx (now DIU), was a principal architect of the Pentagon’s 2018 AI strategy and of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, the DoD’s first department-wide applied AI hub. Early investments include Prime Intellect, AIUC, and Workshop Labs; LPs include Reid Hoffman and Fred Wilson.. @Brendan_McCord - Impulse Space added $308 million to its Series D, taking the round to $808 million at roughly $5.4 billion. Its 2028 rideshare missions are already sold out. @GoToImpulse - Matter Venture Partners closed a $450 million second fund for seed and Series A hardtech, with TSMC and ASML among the limited partners. The two most important companies in semiconductor manufacturing are now backing a fund that writes early checks. - Noetive came out of stealth with a $41 million seed led by Eclipse to build a coordination layer for physical operations, plugging sensing and AI into existing plant systems. Meta's CTO and Nest's co-founder are among the angels. @NoetiveAI - Fluxnium raised a $7 million seed led by Congruent, with Constellation Energy strategic, to pull uranium out of seawater using polymer fibers on ocean buoys. - BAE launched Shadow EW, a family of electronic warfare pods for drones and small aircraft built on commercial chips. It claims costs in the thousands against several million for existing Air Force jammers, which is the whole point. - The Space Force created a Technology Portfolio Executive reporting straight to its acquisition chief, aimed at the valley of death between a working prototype and a funded program. The office exists, they're hiring the leader. ALLIED HARDTECH: - Germany and the US signed a letter of intent making Germany an additional production site for American munitions when US capacity is full. PAC-3 Patriot interceptor production starts at MBDA's Schrobenhausen plant later this year, with Tomahawk components under discussion. - Scotland's iGii raised £22.7 million, about half equity and half public money, to commercialize a porous carbon nanomaterial it grows at room temperature rather than mining. Targets are sensors, microheaters, and battery electrodes. - Canada's Kanin Energy raised up to $100 million from S2G and the Canada Growth Fund to build plants that turn industrial waste heat into power, sold back to oil, cement, and steel sites below market rate. That's today! Follow for more.

Here's my hardtech brief for September 15th, 2026 U.S. HARDTECH: - Castelion won a Navy production order worth up to $200 million for Blackbeard, moving its low-cost hypersonic weapon from prototypes into real manufacturing. It builds at a 1,000-acre campus in Rio Rancho, New Mexico and in Torrance, California. @Castelion - Anduril's Fury drone has already flown in formation with F-35s and fired a live air-to-air missile at a simulated target using another aircraft's sensor data. Both disclosed at the Air Force conference this week, and F-35 pilots aren't controlling it yet. - The Air Force will stand up its own base air defense system and a dedicated career field within two years, citing damage from Iranian missile barrages on US bases. It's weighing guns, lasers, and a new acquisition office to buy it all. - Boeing took $552 million for the first three production MQ-25A Stingrays, the Navy's carrier-launched refueling drone, with deliveries from 2029. The program calls for 67 operational aircraft. - Air Force Special Operations revealed an AC-130 gunship fired two Leidos Havoc Spear cruise missiles at targets in Africa last spring. The missile runs about $600k a round with 400-plus miles of standoff, and Leidos is scaling Huntsville toward 15k units a year. - Westinghouse's eVinci test reactor went critical at 663°C and took a measurement at a peak core temperature above 1,000°C, a record for that Nevada facility. It feeds the design for the 5-megawatt heat pipe microreactor. @westinghouse - TeRAM came out of stealth with a $37 million seed led by Primary Venture Partners to stack fast memory directly onto AI processors. The target is the memory wall, where chips compute faster than they can be fed data. - Radian Forge raised a $2.5 million seed led by Veteran Ventures for large-format metal 3D printing of Navy parts. It claims 40 to 80% off the 12 to 18 month lead times the shipbuilding base currently lives with. @radianforge ALLIED HARDTECH: - The Netherlands' EUCLYD raised over €200 million in a Series A led by Samsung, with former ASML chief Peter Wennink as chairman. Its chip computes directly in memory to cut the energy cost of AI inference, Europe's most serious swing at an Nvidia alternative. - Britain is moving to take Speciality Steel UK into public ownership after rejecting a private bid, covering four sites and 1,300 jobs. The company makes steel for landing gear, helicopter rotors, and missiles, and has been in liquidation since last August. See y'all tomorrow! Follow if you aren't already :).

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Hope everyone had a great weekend! Here' my hardtech brief for September 14th, 2026 U.S. HARDTECH: - The Air Force secretary confirmed the US has weapons in orbit, the first time a Pentagon official has said so publicly. Troy Meink didn't say what kind or how many. - Same speech: 500 collaborative combat aircraft by 2032 at about $30 million each, a third of an F-35, plus tens of thousands of cheap cruise missiles by 2030. Those aircraft are uncrewed jets that fly alongside manned fighters. - Rocket Lab protested NASA's $700 million Mars orbiter award to Blue Origin, which freezes Blue Origin's work until the GAO rules around mid-December. - Cornelis Networks raised $205 million led by IAG Capital and paired with Qualcomm on AI networking. It puts compute inside the network so data gets processed in transit instead of just forwarded. @CornelisHPC - PBS Aerospace doubled engine test capacity in Roswell, Georgia, heading for 10k small turbojets a year by 2028. Those go into the cheap cruise missiles the Air Force just said it wants. @pbs_aerospace - Agilis Air raised $1.4 million to scale a $1,250 reconnaissance quadcopter on a fully domestic supply chain. Drones priced like ammunition rather than aircraft. - The NRC proposed a 339-page rewrite of reactor licensing, scaling seismic requirements to actual risk and dropping the 15-year expiration on approved designs. It projects $311 to $411 million in savings over 30 years. - Y Combinator's fall batch skewed hardtech, with nuclear-powered floating data centers, jet-powered strike drones, and heavy-lift construction robots among the names VCs flagged. ALLIED HARDTECH: - Open Cosmos raised €300 million at over $1 billion, Europe's newest space unicorn. The UK and Spain based smallsat maker will expand four European factories. - Ukraine says one of its drone boats machine-gunned a Russian drone boat in the Black Sea, which would be the first robot boat to kill another. No date or location given, so treat it as a claim. - The Netherlands' Fortaegis raised a $50 million Series A to build chip security into hardware rather than software, aimed at defense systems, satellites, and telecom. That's today. Follow for more.

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Here's my hardtech weekly roundup! U.S. HARDTECH: - Covenant came out of stealth with Anthem, a Tomahawk-class missile carrying over 200 kilograms, and disclosed $250 million raised from a16z, Founders Fund, Lux, 8VC, Aleph, and Lightspeed. It's pitched at mid-six figures a round against roughly $5 million for a Tomahawk, with a Dallas plant plus lines in Germany and Israel. - Mach Industries added $600 million at a $3.7 billion valuation, taking total raised past $1 billion, with Ribbit, Bedrock, and Sequoia all doubling down. The money goes to manufacturing capacity across strike drones, glide munitions, and low-cost interceptors. - Positron AI raised $875 million at a $5 billion valuation for inference chips built on commodity LPDDR5X memory rather than HBM, the high-bandwidth memory that's the tightest constraint in AI hardware right now. NEA, Atreides, and Valor led, and its Atlas system is already deployed. - Stoke Space closed the first $1 billion of a Series E co-led by Point72 Ventures and Spark Capital, putting it at $2.3 billion raised. It's building Nova, a rocket meant to be reusable all the way up including the second stage, with a hydrogen-cooled metal heat shield rated for 100 flights. - L3Harris took $4.7 billion from Lockheed Martin to supply propulsion for the PAC-3, the interceptor at the heart of Patriot that kills by hitting rather than exploding. It covers seven-plus years of rocket motors, with two new plants going up in Camden, Arkansas. - USA Rare Earth broke ground on a $1.2 billion magnet plant in Blacksburg, South Carolina, targeting 6,400 tonnes a year of sintered neodymium magnets plus 5,000 tonnes of metal and alloy. Those magnets go into everything from fighter jets to submarines, and China makes almost all of them today. - Nitradyn won $581 million from the Pentagon for an explosives plant in Graham, Kentucky making about 8 million pounds a year of IMX-104. That's the insensitive-munitions fill for artillery and mortar rounds, meaning it won't detonate if shot or dropped, and Nitradyn is a joint venture that only formed last year. - GrayMatter Robotics laid out a deal with HII worth up to $900 million over seven years to automate Navy shipbuilding, with robots doing the cutting, welding, grinding, blasting, and coating. It's also building a fully autonomous greenfield shipyard with Path Robotics, then replicating the model at existing yards. - Antares won $161 million from the Air Force to demonstrate a nuclear reactor in space, which the company calls the largest current Department of War award in space nuclear power. It covers a ground test of its R1-S heat pipe reactor, integration onto a spacecraft, and eventually powering a real asset in orbit. - The Defense Innovation Unit will start sponsoring facility clearances so startups can sit in on classified requirements talks before bidding. A facility clearance is the company-level approval you need to touch classified work at all, and processing time for venture-backed firms is already down five or six fold. ALLIED HARDTECH: - The UK put £7.8 billion behind a new space strategy through 2030, with more than £3 billion of it military. The largest lines are £2.8 billion for satellite communications including the SKYNET military network and £880 million for tracking what's happening in orbit. - The Exploration Company raised a $450 million Series C led by Bessemer, Atomico, and EQT's Scaleup Europe fund, taking it to about $680 million. The French-German company builds Nyx, a reusable capsule for hauling cargo to and from orbit, plus a methane engine for future heavy launchers. - Hanwha Aerospace landed a €411.8 million Croatian order for 18 Chunmoo rocket launchers plus ammunition carriers and guided rockets reaching about 300 kilometers. Poland's WB Group supplies the battle management software, and deliveries run through 2030. That's the week. Follow for more.

For Welles!

It's been a quarter century. This day in the calendar is always tough and with today's milestone, it's even more so. Today, I'm thinking about those in my small town outside NYC whose parents worked in the Twin Towers, as well as the friends I served alongside in AFG who answered the call. Here's my hardtech brief for September 11th, 2026 U.S. HARDTECH: - Antares won $161 million from the Air Force to put a nuclear reactor in space, which the company says is the largest such award the Pentagon has made. It covers a ground demonstration of its R1-S heat pipe reactor, integration onto a spacecraft, and then powering a real asset with a bigger reactor due to run in 2027. @AntaresNuclear - Allen Control Systems opened a 191k square foot plant in Austin to build Bullfrog, a turret that bolts computer vision onto machine guns the military already owns. It knocks drones down with ordinary ammunition out to 1,500 meters instead of spending a missile, and the company is valued over $2 billion after a $200 million round. - Swarmer is buying Ratel Robotics for up to $224 million, folding a Kyiv ground-robot maker into an Austin autonomy software company. Ratel booked $86 million in contracts this year and accounts for roughly 37% of Ukraine's ground robot spending, and Swarmer's software has run more than 100k combat missions. @getswarmer - The Defense Innovation Unit will start sponsoring facility clearances for startups so they can sit in on classified requirements talks before bidding. A facility clearance is the company-level approval you need to touch classified work at all, and processing time for venture-backed firms has already come down five or six fold. - The Space Force picked Lake Kickapoo, Texas for the third and final DARC site, a radar network the US, UK, and Australia are building together. DARC watches geosynchronous orbit around the clock in any weather, which is where most big communications and spy satellites sit, and this one should be operational by 2030. - Tomorrow .io revealed the five instrument types going on DeepSky, a twelve-satellite weather constellation with York Space Systems as prime under a $187 million contract. The suite includes precipitation radar and sounders that read the atmosphere by how GPS signals bend passing through it. - Ultra Maritime says five US-spec sonobuoys are now production-ready and that it builds more than 1k a day across three countries. Sonobuoys are the expendable sonar floats aircraft drop to hunt submarines, and the company modernized its Indiana plant to get there. - New Mexico's land commissioner banned new uranium leases on state trust land and ordered cleanup of legacy sites. It sits awkwardly against the federal push to expand nuclear, and domestic uranium still covers only a small share of what US reactors actually use. ALLIED HARDTECH: - Britain will fit DragonFire lasers to Royal Navy Type 45 destroyers starting in 2027, part of a £490 million push on directed-energy weapons. A laser costs pennies a shot against thousands for a missile, and the ships get another £600 million of upgrades with an initial ballistic missile defense capability targeted for 2028. - Canada's Galaxia raised $4.5 million Canadian in seed funding co-led by Amiral Ventures and Invest Nova Scotia for satellites that process imagery in orbit. Doing the work up there instead of beaming raw data down cuts what has to move over a slow link, which is the usual bottleneck in Earth observation. That's today. Follow for more.

Here's my hardtech brief for September 10th, 2026 U.S. HARDTECH: - Mach Industries added $600 million to its Series C at a $3.7 billion valuation, with Ribbit, Bedrock, and Sequoia all doubling down and total raised now past $1 billion. The money goes to manufacturing capacity across its lineup of strike drones, glide munitions, and low-cost interceptors. @Mach_Industries - Nitradyn won $581 million from the Pentagon to build an explosives plant in Graham, Kentucky making about 8 million pounds a year of IMX-104. That's the insensitive-munitions fill used in artillery and mortar rounds, meaning it won't go off if shot or dropped. - GrayMatter Robotics laid out a deal with HII worth up to $900 million over seven years to automate Navy shipbuilding, with robots doing the cutting, welding, grinding, blasting, and coating. It's also building a fully autonomous greenfield shipyard alongside Path Robotics, with plans to replicate the model at existing yards afterward. - Positron AI raised $875 million at a $5 billion valuation for AI inference chips built on commodity LPDDR5X memory rather than HBM, the high-bandwidth memory that's the tightest supply constraint in AI hardware right now. NEA, Atreides, and Valor led, and its Atlas system is already deployed with new silicon due late this year. @positron_ai - Maven Robotics came out of stealth with a $100 million Series A led by RoboStrategy for wheeled two-armed robots that stack mixed pallets in warehouses. Each lifts 30 kilos, moves at 10 miles an hour, and runs 16-plus hours a day, and the company has about eight deployed with 250 more planned. - Cyclic Materials opened its first US plant, a $20 million facility in Mesa, Arizona that pulls magnets out of scrapped cars, robots, and electronics. It handles up to 25k tonnes of scrap a year, and a bigger South Carolina site that will also refine the rare earths on site is due in 2028. - Overland AI won $20 million from the Army for autonomous breaching, meaning clearing a path through a minefield without sending people into it. Its software lets one operator run several robotic vehicles beyond line of sight, with field tests in early 2027. @Overland_AI_X - Northrop flew Lumberjack, a mid-size attack drone it built in under 14 months, through repeated flights with no GPS at all. It navigates by reading tiny variations in Earth's magnetic field using quantum magnetometers from SandboxAQ, and it held up even over open water where there's less to match against. ALLIED HARDTECH: - Thales Alenia Space signed an initial €500 million tranche with Eutelsat to build the secure government payloads for 330 IRIS2 satellites. IRIS2 is the EU's own encrypted satellite network, its answer to Starlink, and total lifecycle work on this piece is projected above €3 billion. - The UK's KVector raised £3.8 million led by Midlands Mindforge for metamaterial antennas that steer a beam without the thousands of components a conventional phased array needs. A phased array aims a radar or comms beam electronically instead of by turning a dish, and doing it cheaply opens up platforms too small or power-starved to carry one. That's today. Follow for more.

Here's my hardtech brief for September 9th, 2026 U.S. HARDTECH: - Covenant came out of stealth with Anthem, a long-range missile in the Tomahawk class carrying over 200 kilograms, and disclosed $250 million raised across three rounds from a16z, Founders Fund, Lux, 8VC, Aleph, and Lightspeed. The pitch is mid-six-figure cost against roughly $5 million for a Tomahawk, with a Dallas plant plus lines in Germany and Israel. @HQ_Covenant - Northrop Grumman won $4.84 billion to put CIRCM into full-rate production, the largest award on Tuesday's Pentagon list. CIRCM is a laser jammer mounted on helicopters that blinds the seekers on incoming heat-seeking missiles. - Iran's Revolutionary Guard seized an Anduril Dive-LD near the Strait of Hormuz, a 19-foot, three-ton underwater drone. A US official said it was an older model carrying nothing classified, and Anduril noted the vehicle is built to be attritable, meaning losing one is part of the design. - Besxar raised a $9 million seed led by Dauntless Ventures and Overture VC to make semiconductor materials in orbit. Space already has the vacuum you'd otherwise build a billion-dollar cleanroom to get, so the company straps small "fabships" onto Falcon 9 boosters, with about a dozen flights booked. @BesxarFoundry - Bulwark Dynamics raised a $6.8 million seed for Caravel, an uncrewed landing craft that runs supplies onto beaches without GPS. The Navy's fleet of logistics connectors has fallen from 140 vessels in 2018 to under 70, and Bulwark is targeting under $1 million a boat, with Japan's Onomichi Dockyard building hulls. @BulwarkDynamics - The Space Force expects to spend nearly $17 billion more on launch through 2032, adding 91 missions for 337 total. Cost per launch has fallen from about $422 million in 2022 to $192 million, though right now only SpaceX can fly them, with Vulcan and New Glenn both grounded after failures. ALLIED HARDTECH: - The UK's CloudNC raised a $20 million Series B extension led by Nimble Ventures, with Lockheed Martin's venture arm joining. Its software writes the code that drives CNC machines, the computer-controlled cutters behind most precision parts, and more than 1k machine shops use it, 80% of them American. - Hanwha Ocean was named preferred bidder for Thailand's next-generation frigate at about 16.7 billion baht, beating Navantia, ST Engineering, and Hyundai among others. Korean yards keep taking export work on price and delivery speed, and detailed negotiations start now. - Japan's Algomatic Dynamics raised ¥5 billion, roughly $34 million, from DMM as its first outside money, four months after being incorporated. It's building multi-finger robot hands and bipedal control aimed at Japan's manufacturing labor shortage, with a domestic hand platform due by year end. That's today. Follow for more.

Here's my hardtech brief for September 8th, 2026 U.S. HARDTECH: - Stoke Space closed the first $1 billion of a Series E co-led by Point72 Ventures and Spark Capital, putting it at $2.3 billion raised. It's building Nova, a rocket meant to be fully reusable including the upper stage, using a hydrogen-cooled metal heat shield the company says is good for 100 flights. - The Energy Department closed a $1.9 billion loan for NextEra to restart Duane Arnold, a 615-megawatt plant in Iowa that shut down in 2020. Google is the primary customer, and it's the third nuclear restart this DOE has financed, with a 2029 target. - Bluecore Energy raised a $50 million seed led by Silverton Partners just two months after launching, on top of a $10 million pre-seed. The company puts small reactors on barges so they can be towed to a port and plugged in, borrowing from 70 years of Navy shipboard reactors, and it's already in front of both the NRC and the Coast Guard. - Poseidon Aerospace raised a $60 million Series A led by TQ Ventures for uncrewed cargo aircraft. The plan isn't to sell airframes but to run its own regional freight business against UPS and FedEx, starting with a 50-foot-wingspan plane called Egret that should fly by year end. @poseidonaero - Trump threatened to bar Bombardier from selling in the US, which puts the Army's HADES spy plane in an awkward spot. HADES is the Army's new manned surveillance aircraft, built on a Bombardier business jet, and the older turboprop fleet has already been retired to make room for it. - Agility Robotics disclosed $1.8 million in 2025 sales against a $140 million operating loss, ahead of a SPAC merger valuing it at $2.5 billion. - Kairos Power finished the first test phase on ETU 3, a full-scale mockup of its reactor, at Oak Ridge. The runs validated the precast shielding and remote handling gear it needs for Hermes 2, its demonstration plant, so the same design carries into commercial units. ALLIED HARDTECH: - The UK put £7.8 billion behind a new space strategy through 2030, with more than £3 billion of it military. The big lines are £2.8 billion for satellite communications including SKYNET, the military satcom network, and £880 million for watching what's happening in orbit. - The Exploration Company raised a $450 million Series C led by Bessemer, Atomico, and EQT's Scaleup Europe fund, taking it to about $680 million. The French-German company builds Nyx, a reusable capsule for hauling cargo to and from orbit, and is working on a methane engine for future heavy launchers. - Germany's Ground A raised over €9 million pre-seed led by Vsquared Ventures, six months after being founded. Its GA 1000 pairs radar and computer vision with a laser to knock down small drones, weighs under 200 kilos, fits on a Euro pallet, and keeps a human in the loop on firing. That's today! Follow for more.