REGENT's $240M seaglider 🌊, Heaviside's $99M win 💥, Golden Dome tests 🛡️

REGENT raises $240M Series B to start Seaglider production

Rhode Island seaglider maker REGENT Craft closed a $240 million Series B, split evenly between equity and debt, co-led by Mare Liberum and AE Ventures. The round takes REGENT to $340 million raised, ahead of the Viceroy prototype's first human flight and production start at a 255,000-square-foot factory. Founders Fund, Lockheed Martin Ventures and DCVC are on the cap table, and an expanded $15 million Marine Corps contract makes this a defense story.

IBM closes its purchase of HRL Laboratories

IBM said Wednesday it completed its acquisition of HRL Laboratories, the Boeing and General Motors jointly owned lab founded in 1948, on undisclosed terms. HRL brings silicon-spin qubits, quantum sensing, cryogenics and control electronics alongside IBM's superconducting architecture, with chip fabrication moving from California to IBM's New York site. A defense research lab with 78 years of government programs becoming a business unit inside a quantum roadmap is vertical integration arriving in national-security computing.

Heaviside wins a $99M Army ceiling for the MOTH spectrum analyzer

Heaviside Industries, of Marina del Rey, California, won a $99,000,000 firm-fixed-price indefinite-delivery contract for the MOTH spectrum analyzer, running to August 2031. Bids were solicited via the internet and 99 were received, an unusually contested field for a nine-figure ceiling. It lands two weeks after Heaviside's $60 million Felicis-led Series B, and a fully competed ceiling this size is the graduation step most startups never reach.

LeoLabs takes a $20.68M Space Force prototype OTA for Scout

The Space Force awarded commercial space-domain-awareness firm LeoLabs a $20.68 million Prototype Other Transaction Agreement to deliver a Scout radar modified for national security missions. Scout is a shipping-container-sized mobile radar; LeoLabs deployed its first in the Indo-Pacific in June and began tracking Chinese ISR satellites and China's spaceplane within hours. A company that built its business selling collision warnings to satellite operators is converting a commercial sensor network into a defense sensing line.

Parsons lands a seat on the $14B COMET IDIQ

Parsons announced Wednesday it won a place on Contract Operations for Missile Evaluation and Testing, a multiple-award IDIQ worth up to $14 billion. COMET supports the Defense Intelligence Agency's Missile and Space Intelligence Center across five task areas, including foreign materiel exploitation and modeling and simulation. Characterizing adversary weapons is the upstream input for every interceptor program now being funded, which makes seats here quietly strategic.

Northrop takes DARPA THREADS Phase 2 for diamond-cooled chips

Northrop Grumman took a $7 million Phase 2 award under DARPA's Technologies for Heat Removal in Electronics at the Device Scale program for diamond-cooled chips. Phase 1 raised power density 3.3 times, and Phase 2 targets roughly tripling it again using diamond grown on the device backside with Stanford. Thermal limits, not transistor counts, cap RF transmitter power, so device-scale cooling is an unglamorous unlock for radar, satellite links and electronic warfare.

Japan approves mass production of 3D-printed interceptor drones

Japan's Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Agency signed a mass-production agreement for Terra Drone's Terra B1, a rocket-launched interceptor selected after a Maritime Self-Defense Force demonstration last month. Quantity and price were not disclosed, but the tender closed in three months against the one to two years such bids normally take. Terra Drone plans distributed printing sites so a single strike cannot halt output, which is the supply-chain lesson Ukraine taught being written into procurement.

Golden Dome's first large-scale tests targeted command and control

Vice director Brian Gibson said Wednesday the shield's first two large-scale tests validated software and sensor-to-shooter linkages that fielded systems do not have. Vendors without programs of record were invited to observe, and a nine-company industry consortium is guiding the command-and-control network. Further tests depend on fiscal 2027 money riding on another reconciliation package, against a $180 billion projected cost some analysts put past a trillion.

Pentagon's Europe review will hand Hegseth four option sets by November 6

A Pentagon review of the roughly 80,000 US troops in Europe will give Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at least four force-posture options by November 6. Policy chief Elbridge Colby takes a decision briefing with the top US general in Europe by September 18, and allied questionnaire responses are due Friday. The criteria reach past basing into space, cyber and intelligence infrastructure, so the outcome reprices European demand for US-supplied enablers.

GAO says submarine idle time has cost the Navy $3.4B

The Government Accountability Office said Thursday that maintenance delays and idle time for attack submarines cost the Navy $3.4 billion over the past decade. Fifteen more boats enter inactive idle from fiscal 2026 through 2030 at a further $3.1 billion, with the USS Pasadena alone costing over $300 million. GAO also flagged Virginia-class deliveries at one per year against a two-per-year goal, the industrial-base constraint behind every shipbuilding supplemental.

SyQwest took a $14.1M Navy award for MK48 torpedo sensor kits, with options carrying it to $92.4M.

RTX's Pratt & Whitney got a $240.8M modification to mature the F135 engine and support its core upgrade.

Elbit America won a $34.1M Army IDIQ to repair Apache integrated helmet and display sight components.

Breaking Defense laid out 13 unresolved FY27 defense budget questions now in front of Congress.

The Marine Corps set a 15-year plan betting on technology-heavy but human-centric ground warfare.

The Air Force is seeking a more portable command-and-control and comms approach after studying Epic Fury.