Funding round, which also includes JPMorgan Chase and Andreessen Horowitz, values hypersonic munitions maker at $13 billion

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.

With tens of billions of dollars flowing into defense technology in the first several months of 2026 alone, it is worth pausing to consider the future of the sector and how today’s high-potential defense tech leaders might evolve over the next decade. Today’s early winners will have the option to go public before the end of the decade.

First In, Mission-driven venture capital firm investing in security technologies, today announced that Rebecca Gevalt has joined the firm as a general partner. In this role, Gevalt will help lead First In's venture growth-stage strategy, extending the firm's ability to partner with founders from early innovation through scaled growth.

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.

Anthropic might have misgivings about giving the US military unfettered access to its AI models, but some startups are building advanced AI specifically for military applications.

First In today announced the oversubscribed final closing of First In Fund 3 SBIC Critical Technologies, LP, a fund licensed as a Small Business Investment Company Critical Technologies.

First In reads the National Security Strategy as a durable, bipartisan roadmap toward reindustrialization and supply-chain security—and announces the oversubscribed close of Fund 3 against that backdrop.

Renny McPherson and Arthur Karell argue that the lessons of low-cost drone warfare can help close America’s hypersonic gap, where decades of legacy incentives produced exquisite systems but little scale.

Pryzm today announced a $12.2 million seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s (a16z) American Dynamism fund.

AnySignal announced this morning that it closed a $24M Series A, and is moving into a larger manufacturing facility to jumpstart production of its radio products for space and defense clients.

With $350 million in new funding, Castelion is among the companies racing to make the U.S. competitive with Russia and China in Mach 5 warfare.