Smack Technologies, a defense-technology startup building artificial intelligence decision-making tools for ‌the military, is raising funding to speed production of its flagship product and make wearable AI hardware designed for the battlefield.

U.S. budget documents released on April 21 reveal that the U.S. Navy plans to buy 4,500 air-launched hypersonic missiles for Boeing F/A-18E/Fs over the next five years.

Cloneable, a startup that uses AI to shadow human experts in heavy industries such as energy and replicate their specialized workflows into autonomous agents, has raised $4.6 million in seed funding, the company tells Crunchbase…

Renny McPherson on First In’s lead investment in SCATR, whose platform fragments, encrypts, and dynamically routes data in transit so that to an adversary it looks like noise, not a stream worth intercepting.

Arthur Karell and Kevin Uebelhardt on First In’s investment in Hybron, whose new approach to composite manufacturing delivers stronger, lighter parts 10–100x faster—closing a critical defense supply-chain gap.

In the weeks since the Department of Defense’s troubled relationship with Anthropic burst into public view and led to the company being kicked out of the U.S. military, new defense-focused AI companies like Smack Technologies…

Portal Space Systems has raised $50 million to bring it to life.

Firm led by two ex-Marines closed on $148M for Fund III thanks certification as a Critical Technology Fund by the US Small Business Administration and the Department of War.

Arthur Karell on why First In backed Vanguard Defense, whose domain-specific datasets let OEMs and integrators build performant autonomy stacks as the cost of edge AI collapses.

Will Wilson wants to make sure the software running everything from your bank account to your favorite crypto exchange actually works—and his company Antithesis is rethinking how software has been tested for the last 80 years.