All 12 Defense & Aerospace posts we have indexed from venture capital blogs and newsletters, plus the highest-scoring pieces of the past year and the people who write about it most.
A deep analysis of how capital structures evolve for hard-asset businesses (energy, manufacturing, space, robotics). Shows how Fervo, Hadrian, and Rocket Lab progressed from expensive corporate debt to cheaper project-level financing—with contracts and creditworthy buyers as collateral—and identifies the conditions needed to reach full production finance and securitization.
America's defense-tech renaissance has created a bottleneck: scaling production requires modernizing an aging, fragmented supplier base. A16z argues this manufacturing gap is a national security liability and a generational venture opportunity to build technology-first suppliers using co-engineering, software, and capital.
Exploring how companies ride tailwinds—temporary subsidies in customer education, capital, or political will—and why the truly durable ones are those built to survive when the wind dies. Anduril's ChatGPT boost and the defense-tech bubble illustrate both the opportunity and the risk.
AI infrastructure exhibits classic bullwhip dynamics: demand shocks in GPUs cascade through memory, CPUs, and storage with multi-year lags, locking in higher costs at each stage and risking severe overcapacity when software revenues fail to justify $20B/GW data center buildouts.
Autonomous systems need formal safety cases—structured arguments backed by evidence that a system is acceptably safe in specific contexts—rather than relying solely on benchmark scores; aviation, rail, and nuclear industries use this approach, and insurers can better underwrite risks with named hazards and residual risk declarations.
AI has collapsed the economics of discovery in hard sciences, transforming venture's investment landscape from software-first to deep tech-first, accelerated by founder proof points and geopolitical demand for sovereignty.
Germany faces structural economic headwinds—Chinese competition, high labor costs, pension crises, and political instability—even as venture funding rebounds. European tech lags globally, but German startups, unicorns, and AI/defense investment show resilience amid geopolitical shifts.
U.S. military stockpiles of advanced munitions are dangerously shallow relative to potential conflicts; the Pentagon's 97%-to-3% budget split favoring expensive legacy systems over lower-cost alternatives leaves insufficient depth. Shifting procurement toward commercially-designed munitions—now available at 5–15× lower unit cost—would stretch defense dollars further and support sustained production capacity.
A16Z (8) · General Catalyst (3) · Not Boring (3) · Antler (3) · Abe Murray (2) · Tomasz Tunguz (1) · Turner Novak (1) · Craft Ventures (1) · Akash Bajwa (1) · Kyle Harrison (1)
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