Crusoe = $30B 💰, Northrop's $863M kits 🎯, Auterion's €300M line 🚁

Crusoe raises $3B at a $30B valuation

Crusoe closed more than $3B co-led by Atreides Management and Valor Equity Partners, with Mubadala Capital participating, tripling the $10B valuation it carried last October. The raise follows a $13B five-year cloud contract with Jane Street, and Crusoe already builds hyperscale campuses for OpenAI and Oracle. Power-first data-center builders are becoming strategic infrastructure, which puts them squarely inside the national-security compute conversation.

HiddenLayer raises $100M to secure AI agents at runtime

Austin-based HiddenLayer raised $100M led by Delta-v Capital, with Booz Allen Ventures, M12, Morgan Stanley, and Ten Eleven Ventures joining, taking total funding past $155M. Founded in 2022, the company protects generative and agentic AI in production and will extend coverage to AI coding agents. Booz Allen on the cap table is the tell: agent runtime security is heading toward federal accreditation boundaries.

Northrop lands an $863M Army ceiling for artillery guidance kits

The Army awarded Northrop Grumman a firm-fixed-price IDIQ with an $862.8M ceiling for M1156 precision guidance kits, running through September 2031. The screw-on fuze turns standard 155mm shells into GPS-guided rounds accurate to 10 to 50 meters at a fraction of Excalibur's cost. Cheap precision retrofits, not new munitions, remain the fastest way to close the artillery accuracy gap Ukraine exposed.

Auterion and Airlogix begin a €300M drone line for Ukraine

Arlington-based Auterion and Ukraine's Airlogix began production on more than 5,000 strike drones under a €300M German contract due for completion by mid-2027. One model flies a medium range and the other reaches 1,500 kilometers, pairing combat-proven airframes with Auterion's Skynode computer and Nemyx swarm software. An American company now runs Europe's largest drone production program, the export template US autonomy vendors should be chasing.

ManTech takes a $345M Navy cyber and C3I task order

ManTech won a five-year $345M task order supporting Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane, awarded September 2 under the DTIC IAC MAC vehicle. The research and development work spans electronic warfare, strategic missions, and expeditionary warfare, with emphasis on expeditionary C3I and cyber capabilities. Buying R&D through a multiple-award vehicle is how the Navy moves fast, and it is where incumbents quietly hold the integration seat.

Hermeus picks Anduril's Lattice autonomy for Quarterhorse Mk 2

Anduril will integrate Lattice for Mission Autonomy into Hermeus's Quarterhorse Mk 2, its first commercial deal placing the stack on a third-party Group 5 aircraft. Quarterhorse is funded by the Defense Innovation Unit and targets Mach 3, with the first mission-autonomy flight planned for 2027. Anduril is positioning Lattice as a merchant autonomy layer rather than a captive advantage for its own airframes.

Ukrainian sea drones strike Sochi for the first time

Ukrainian uncrewed surface vessels struck the port at Sochi and hit the offshore support vessel Nefrit, the first confirmed USV attack on the Black Sea resort city. Sochi sits roughly 350 miles in a straight line from the nearest Ukrainian-held territory, and the actual transit is considerably longer. Cheap maritime drones keep outrunning fleet defenses, and the range curve is the number US shipbuilders should be pricing.

War Department opens a Secure Space Network for classified work

The War Department will design, build, and deploy roughly 50 mobile SCIFs across the country so more suppliers can join classified development and production. The Office of Industrial Base Growth is leading the effort with the Space Development Agency, siting units at military installations and APEX Accelerators. Standing up fixed classified infrastructure has been a quiet moat protecting incumbents, and renting it by the trailer removes a real barrier to entry.

Lawmakers press the Army over a shuttered drone unit

A bipartisan group of lawmakers cited deep concerns after the Army ordered its 600-soldier Unmanned Assault Battalion to drop the drone mission and return to airborne infantry work. The Europe-based unit was created in November as a Ukraine-informed experiment and will end the specialized mission after an exercise in Germany this month. Killing the learning organization while buying more drones is the mismatch that slows doctrine long after the hardware arrives.

Trump names Adam Telle acting Army secretary

Adam Telle, the Army's assistant secretary for civil works, was named acting Army secretary after Dan Driscoll resigned amid reported friction with Pete Hegseth. Telle inherits an Army mid-transformation on drones, lasers, and munitions capacity, with a continuing resolution constraining new production starts. Acting tenures usually mean program decisions slip, so expect Army new-start timelines to drift another quarter.

Seasats booked more than $24M in committed USV and robot-as-a-service orders in one month.

NASA picked Blue Origin for a $700M Mars telecommunications orbiter built on Blue Ring.

BWXT won a $4M conceptual design phase for a new NNSA lithium processing module at Y-12.

Congress is maneuvering to keep the E-7 Wedgetail program funded.