Latest news with #defensetech
Bloomberg
a day ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Bloomberg Technology 6/5/2025
Bloomberg Technology hits the road with Ed Ludlow and Caroline Hyde live from the Tech Summit in San Francisco. They speak with Anduril Executive Chairman Trae Stephens about the company's latest fundraise and the future of defense tech, Agility Robotics CEO Peggy Johnson about her outlook for the robotics industry, and they hear from Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai on AI competition on the horizon. (Source: Bloomberg)
TechCrunch
2 days ago
- Business
- TechCrunch
Anduril raises $2.5B at $30.5B valuation led by Founders Fund
Founders Fund has led another, enormous round for defense tech startup Anduril with a $1 billion investment as part of a new $2.5 billion raise, the largest check the firm has ever written. Existing investors also piled in, an Anduril spokesperson tells TechCrunch. Anduril has now doubled its valuation to $30.5 billion with this series G raise. An Anduril spokesperson says the round was over 8x times oversubscribed, meaning many more investors wanted to buy than the amount of stock Anduril was selling. Anduril, which makes autonomous weapons and software to control them, says the new funding was raised after the company doubled its revenue in 2024 to about $1 billion. The company is also enjoying a tailwind from being granted the U.S. Army's enormous contract for developing new AR/VR headsets for soldiers. The contract was originally granted to Microsoft with a total $22 billion budget, but was reassigned to Anduril in February. That contract is such a big deal, it even caused Anduril founder Palmer Luckey to publicly forgive his former employer Meta last week as the two companies announced a partnership to create devices for the project. Anduril Executive chair and co-founder Trae Stephens, who is also a Founder's Fund partner, disclosed the new funding on an interview on Bloomberg Television.
Bloomberg
2 days ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Meta's ‘Patriotism' Spurs Shift to Military Technology
By Welcome to Tech In Depth, our daily newsletter with reporting and analysis about the business of tech from Bloomberg's journalists around the world. Today, Kurt Wagner reports on Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth's comments at the Bloomberg Technology Summit about the company's decision to work on defense tech. Help us improve Bloomberg's newsletters: Take a quick survey to share your thoughts on your signup experience and what you'd like to see in the future.
Japan Times
2 days ago
- Business
- Japan Times
Mark Zuckerberg finally found a use for his Metaverse — war
I can't think of any other deal that more encapsulates how Silicon Valley has changed in the past couple of years than this one, announced last week in a press release: Anduril and Meta are partnering to design, build and field a range of integrated XR products that provide warfighters with enhanced perception and enable intuitive control of autonomous platforms on the battlefield. For starters, Anduril Industries is a defense tech company co-founded by Palmer Luckey, the man who created the Oculus VR headset that was acquired by Meta Platforms for $2 billion in 2014, only for Luckey to be pushed out when it emerged he had financially backed a pro-Donald Trump campaign group. That he would be welcomed back with open arms is yet another sign that such stances are no longer taboo in the halls of Silicon Valley companies. (It could be argued they never should have been.) Second, developing technology for war had been considered a hard red line for many of the engineers working within those leafy campuses, at least in the era after the dot-com boom. At Google, for instance, workers in 2018 held walkouts and forced executives to abandon projects related to military use. Today, defense applications of technology are something companies want to shout from their rooftops, not bury in the basement. (Again, it could be argued that should have always been the case. Who will create tech for the U.S. military if not U.S. tech companies?) In Meta's case, there's another factor at play. Mark Zuckerberg's deal with Anduril — which you assume is just the start of Meta's military hardware ambitions — offers a lifeline to its ailing Reality Labs business. The unit has lost more than $70 billion since the start of 2019. Advancements in quality haven't led to jumps in sales. I've written before that fitness applications are a great selling point, but apparently too few people agree with me. A newer form factor, sunglasses made in partnership with Ray-Ban, have shown potential but still represent a niche product. So instead, maybe the "killer app' for mixed reality is indeed a killer app. "My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers,' Luckey is quoted as saying in a press release. "And the products we are building with Meta do just that.' A prototype of the "Eagle Eye' helmet being developed by the companies is due to be delivered to the Pentagon this year, Luckey told journalist Ashlee Vance in a podcast published alongside the official announcement. He compared its utility to what a player wears in the video game Halo — a heads-up display offering reams of intricate information on targets and locations, plus an AI assistant, Cortana, relaying critical and lifesaving directions. What's also striking about this shift is that it is a sign the historical flow of technological innovation is being turned around. Silicon Valley began as a region set up to develop chips for military tech before the assembled talent branched out into making products for businesses and consumers, such as the personal computer. Many breakthroughs have followed this direction of travel — the internet, the microwave, GPS, super glue, to name a few — but it is now increasingly the other way around. As Luckey put it during the podcast discussing the deal, it turns out that Meta's headsets are "just as useful on the battlefield as they are on the head of any consumer.' See also: artificial intelligence, developed first (and perhaps, at the cutting edge, always) by private sector tech companies. The opportunity is too big to pass up and too lucrative to hold grudges. Luckey says he was willing to work with Meta again because it had become a much different place from the one he was booted out of. Now friends again, he said he believed that Zuckerberg received bad advice when told to fire him and that his coming round to more Republican ways of thinking is genuine — as evidenced by his willingness to make Meta's AI available for government use, too. I've little reason to question Luckey's judgment here, though I wonder if it might be time for Meta to revise its mission statement. "Build the future of human connection,' it states today, not yet updated to reflect that it's now also working on the future of human conflict. Dave Lee is Bloomberg Opinion's U.S. technology columnist.
TechCrunch
12-05-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
This American VC is betting on European defense tech; that's still very unusual
VCs are known to move in herds, which is why Eric Slesinger stands out a bit. While most American investors chase AI startups or U.S.-based defense tech startups, the former CIA officer is hunting for defense tech deals in Europe. In fact, Slesinger, founder of 201 Ventures, recently closed a $22 million fund focused on seed-stage European defense tech startups. His path from developing gadgets and software for CIA agents to becoming perhaps the only American VC exclusively investing in European defense tech also appears to be a prescient one. What would compel someone to leave 'the best first job ever' at the CIA to pursue this specific ambition? As Slesinger told TechCrunch in a recent StrictlyVC Download podcast interview, the answer came from identifying a critical shift that many missed. 'I left because I noticed that the private sector was increasingly playing a role in this competition that I previously had understood really to just be a government to government competition,' Slesinger explained. 'What became obvious more so every day was that the private sector was playing such a big role here.' With degrees from Stanford in mechanical engineering and Harvard Business School, Slesinger's background helped prepare him to bridge the gap between defense technology and commercial ventures. But it was his willingness to go against conventional wisdom that has made him interesting to investors, founders, and tech reporters alike. 'I have always enjoyed going where other people tend to not want to go,' said Slesinger. 'That was why I enjoyed the work at the CIA so much. A couple of things that people there used to say was, 'go where others don't go and do what they can't do.'' As for what U.S. VCs were missing, from Slesinger's point of view there were three things. First, 'Europe has individual entrepreneurs that are just as hungry, just as high conviction, and just as smart as anywhere else in the world.' Second, 'European governments waited way too long to rethink what the arrangement on their own security meant, and therefore hadn't actually taken a critical eye towards it.' And third, 'Europe was quickly being seen and will, in my opinion, continue to be the site of serious gray zone competition,' meaning activities by state or non-state actors that fall between traditional peace and outright war. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Slesinger's European venture has been the cultural resistance he says he encountered regarding defense investments. In 2022, after moving from the U.S. to Madrid, he started the European Defense Investor Network, which now includes entrepreneurs, investors, and policymakers. In a 2023 Medium post, Slesinger wrote about how his European VC colleagues were afraid to talk about their defense related investments. Unlike in America, he told TechCrunch, defense tech investing in Europe 'was seen as uncouth, something that should be done but not spoken about, and certainly not spoken about in polite company at the dinner table.' (Slesinger quickly added, 'I'm exaggerating a little bit, but there's a kernel of truth there.') He says that cultural hesitance resulted in 'many founders thinking about it, deciding not to build a company in the [defense] space.' Now that's changing. The NATO Innovation Fund — the world's first multi-sovereign venture capital fund, backed by 24 NATO allies and launched in the summer of 2022 after the Russia-Ukraine war broke out — has helped. Indeed, it's a significant backer of 201 Ventures. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you've built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you've built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | BOOK NOW So has the attention garnered by up-and-coming defense tech startups on the continent, including Munich-based Helsing, which is developing AI for use on battlefields and is currently valued at more than $5 billion by its investors. Another up-and-comer in Slesinger's portfolio is Delian Alliance Industries, an Athens-based outfit developing surveillance towers to detect autonomous threats. Delian has so far raised seed funding but is a hot ticket that's surely being actively courted by VCs. With eight investments to date, 201 Ventures focuses on technologies that address that gray zone competition because, in Slesinger's words, it's 'happening at scale in Europe, and it will for the next couple of decades.' These market dislocations, he said, 'whether they're price inefficiencies or a government playing a larger role in a market that it might otherwise, if not for wanting a sovereign capability… these gray zone dislocations actually are a good form of alpha.' In addition to Delian, another of Slesinger's bets is Polar Mist, a Swedish startup producing maritime drones with advanced navigation capabilities. Other focus areas include hypersonics and subsurface mapping. One challenge in funding defense tech startups is the longer development timeline compared to traditional venture investments. Slesinger acknowledged this tension in his chat with TechCrunch: 'If you have a 10-year-venture-fund life cycle, that's a real thing that we sort of have to do things to try to accelerate or bend a little bit.' Slesinger also thinks that 'European companies ought to be doing more lobbying at much earlier stages.' Both raise questions about whether his gamble will pay off for investors. At the same time, his early vision for a more autonomous European defense ecosystem is becoming clearer to a whole lot of other investors these days as geopolitical tensions rise and Europe rethinks its security arrangements. Data published earlier this year by the NATO Innovation Fund and the research group Dealroom showed that European startups working on defense and related tech raised 24% more capital in 2024 than in 2023, hitting $5.2 billion — surpassing even AI funding. With President Donald Trump returning to office in January and casting doubt on the U.S.'s commitment to European defense, that figure is likely to climb even higher.
