Defense Innovation Unit is a Pentagon office that scouts and funds commercial technology, often via rapid prototyping contracts, for U.S. military use.
Pete Hegseth announced an Autonomous Warfare Command with service-like powers to develop and field drones, the first new command since 2019, per Reuters. Until it launches within a year, that buying power exists only as an interim prototyping team and a budget request.
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Pentagon budget documents seek $30.3 million over five years for Polygraph+, adding machine-learning scoring and contactless sensing to the lie detector. Both upgrades still depend on the bodily responses that reviews in 1983 and 2003 found poorly supported for screening staff.
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The GHOST-R prototype squeezes production, payload integration, test and delivery into two years. Irvine's TRL-11 supplies the optics, and the spacecraft comes from the company whose GSSAP satellites already watch GEO.
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The Massed Modular Aircraft solicitation pairs a roughly $10 million airframe price with an 8,000 nautical mile self-deploy and 2,800 pounds of payload. GA-ASI says its clean-sheet drone clears all of it years before fiscal 2031.
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Ribbit, Infinite, Bedrock and Sequoia put $600m into Mach Industries at $3.7bn, three months after $300m at $1.8bn. On those marks the second cheque takes 16.2 per cent of the company and the first took 16.7.
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Ribbit, Infinite, Bedrock and Sequoia have put another $600m into Mach Industries at more than double the valuation they themselves set three months ago, lifting the Series C to $900m and lifetime funding past $1bn.
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The four-year vehicle pays to open six new metros and to staff the security function for DIU's picks, but the clearance queue that the Bridge Program memo named first still sits with DCSA rather than with the landlord.
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Honeywell's sensor read the Earth's crust well enough to navigate an Embraer 170 home over open water, and the notable part is how little of the aircraft had to change. A civil version has no date yet.
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The new HyCAT phase combines a booster and a cruiser into a single all-up-round test bed, which is the sort of thing a hypersonic program office would rather rent than build, though nothing published says how often it flies.
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Milestone payments and vendor-owned prototypes push execution risk onto the developer, and the arithmetic says private capital pays for most of the reactors.
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Chariot Defense's Amphora is a control layer over generators, solar and vehicles a brigade already owns. The 60 percent fuel claim is a duty-cycle claim, and the Army will be the one measuring it.
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The Pentagon's Massed Modular Aircraft requirements specify an airframe meant to be lost in bulk. General Atomics answered with four anti-ship missiles and a 10,000-mile ferry range.
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Standard Nuclear will fabricate fuel for the Kaleidos microreactor through the early 2030s. The interesting part is what the deal implies about where microreactor programs actually stall.
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3ME Technology will prototype its EdgeVOLT pack for the US Defense Innovation Unit in two builds. The cold-weather one, using South 8's liquefied-gas cells, is the actual news.
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NODA AI says the Department of War awarded it $100 million. The government notice describes an open prize challenge worth up to $100 million across multiple awards.
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The Defense Innovation Unit and Space Development Agency are funding a preliminary design only. Passing that review buys Firefly the right to compete for the flight, not the flight.
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