The $13 billion startup racing to close America’s hypersonic gap
Castelion, the Torrance, Calif.-based startup has become a darling of the defense tech boom, in part because it encapsulates the movement’s raison d’être: The U.S. must rebuild its industrial base faster, cheaper, and with an eye to scale. The war in Iran has crystallized that bleak reality: The U.S. is firing missiles faster than it can replace them, by an order of years.
Army Awards Shift5 $99M Contract to Support Next Generation Command and Control
The U.S. Army has awarded Shift5 a five-year, $99 million contract to support the service branch’s Next Generation Command and Control, or NGC2, initiative. The company said Thursday the award moves it beyond early prototyping and makes its technology part of the program.
Fortastra Raises $30M Series A to Fund its Next Security Spacecraft
Fortastra, the CA-based startup building orbital-defense spacecraft, today announced a $30M Series A to fund its next-generation spacecraft, and meet the government’s demand for more space-based security systems.
U.S. Navy Awards Castelion $90M to Advance Blackbeard to Early Operational Capability
Castelion has been awarded an $89,997,162 firm-fixed-price order from the U.S. Navy to advance Blackbeard hypersonic strike weapon to Early Operational Capability (EOC). The award is building on Castelion’s prior work regarding “Low Cost Highly Manufacturable Long Range Strike Weapon Production.”
Carlyle Joins $1 Billion Investment Round in Missile Startup Castelion
Funding round, which also includes JPMorgan Chase and Andreessen Horowitz, values hypersonic munitions maker at $13 billion
Pentagon pressure to move AI faster drives Smack's new funding round, CEO says
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.
Budget Records Reveal MACE As Low-Cost Hypersonic Missile
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 Raises $4.6M To ‘Clone’ Expert Worker Knowledge With Agentic AI For Utilities And Infrastructure
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…
Why We Invested in SCATR
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.
Pentagon's ouster of Anthropic opens doors for small AI rivals
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…
This founder helped build SpaceX’s most powerful rocket engine. Now he’s building a ‘fighter jet for orbit.’
Portal Space Systems has raised $50 million to bring it to life.
Why Vanguard: Data Observability for Mission-Critical Autonomy
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.
Startup Antithesis turns years of real-world chaos into hours of simulated mayhem—and key trading firms and crypto networks are paying close attention
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.
What AI Models for War Actually Look Like
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.
Pryzm Raises $12M to Transform Federal Procurement with AI
Pryzm today announced a $12.2 million seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s (a16z) American Dynamism fund.
AnySignal Raises $24M Series A for Radio Production
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.
Alarm Over Hypersonic Missile Gap Fuels Startup Boom
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.
Antithesis: Getting from tested to battle-tested
Testing is an essential part of building reliable software. It’s a form of documentation, a reminder of mistakes of the past, and a boost of confidence when you want to refactor.
U.S. Navy Air-Launched Version Of ‘Cheap’ Blackbeard Hypersonic Missile Hinted At
The Castelion Corporation is now under contract to integrate its Blackbeard missile onto “operational” Navy and Army platforms.