Venus Aerospace raises $91M to build its ‘detonation’ rocket engine
Venus Aerospace raises $91M to build its ‘detonation’ rocket engine

A Texas startup has raised $91m to build a rocket engine most of the industry once wrote off as too hard. Venus Aerospace announced a $91m Series B to develop its Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine, or RDRE. Mercury Fund led the round. The backers read …

Palmer Luckey: US universities are falling behind China’s, and it shows
Palmer Luckey: US universities are falling behind China’s, and it shows

Palmer Luckey has a blunt warning about the US-China tech race: America is losing the classroom. The Anduril founder argues that US universities have stopped teaching engineers how to build. That, he says, hands China a lead well beyond cheap labour. H…

NATO taps Accenture and Leonardo to build a €200M secure cloud backbone
NATO taps Accenture and Leonardo to build a €200M secure cloud backbone

NATO wants a cloud it can trust under fire. Its technology agency has signed a contract worth about €200 million with Accenture and Italy’s Leonardo to build one. Accenture announced the deal on Tuesday, struck at the NATO summit in Ankara. NATO calls …

Russia tries to jam Starlink to counter Ukraine’s long-range drones
Russia tries to jam Starlink to counter Ukraine’s long-range drones

The war in Ukraine has become, among other things, a fight over signals. Russian forces are now trying to jam Elon Musk’s Starlink network to blunt the cheap long-range drones that have reshaped the conflict, according to Ukrainian drone commanders and…

Over 100 US-built autonomous ATVs have been fighting in Ukraine for nine months
Over 100 US-built autonomous ATVs have been fighting in Ukraine for nine months

Forterra, a US builder of autonomous vehicles, revealed that more than 100 of its self-driving ATVs have been deployed in combat zones in Ukraine for the past nine months. The company says it is the largest deployment of autonomous ground vehicles in c…

BAE-backed Expeditions raises €197M fund for European defence startups
BAE-backed Expeditions raises €197M fund for European defence startups

Expeditions, the Warsaw-based venture firm backed by BAE Systems and the NATO Innovation Fund, has closed a €197m ($225m) fund to back the next wave of European defence startups. The raise caps a boom that has seen defence prime BAE commit €50M to outs…

US control of frontier AI hangs over NATO’s Ankara summit
US control of frontier AI hangs over NATO’s Ankara summit

Donald Trump arrives at next week’s NATO summit in Ankara holding unusual leverage, because the US decides which allies get access to the world’s most advanced AI, Politico reports. The alliance meets on 7 and 8 July with AI security questions hovering…

The man who built Pegasus now sells governments the antidote, and Latin America is buying
The man who built Pegasus now sells governments the antidote, and Latin America is buying

Dream, the Israeli AI cybersecurity startup that tripled its valuation to $3 billion this year, is expanding into Latin America. The company is targeting governments aligned with Washington in a region where cyber attacks are reportedly growing 25% ann…

Palmer Luckey’s Erebor bank eyes an $8bn valuation as deposits quadruple
Palmer Luckey’s Erebor bank eyes an $8bn valuation as deposits quadruple

A bank that barely existed a year ago is now chasing a valuation most European lenders can only dream of. Erebor was founded by Anduril’s Palmer Luckey and backed by Peter Thiel. It is in talks to raise at a valuation of at least $8bn, and its deposits…

A rocket motor blew up at Anduril’s Mississippi test site. The defence darling says it’s routine
A rocket motor blew up at Anduril’s Mississippi test site. The defence darling says it’s routine

Anduril has become the poster child for a faster, software-speed kind of defence contractor. Last Friday, one of its rocket motors blew up on a test stand in Mississippi. The blast is a small setback that carries an outsized message about how hard buil…