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NEWS In satellite imaging news, Ukraine is considering switching to Eutelsat. Suggestions that it could lose access to Elon Musk's Starlink satellite system have focused investor interest on its smaller European rival. Eutelsat doesn’t offer quite the same internet speeds as Starlink but as Trump presses Ukraine to accept a compromise favourable to Russia, its reliance on Starlink for battlefield internet is now a vulnerability. Eutelsat’s share price has more than quadrupled since 28th February - this tells its own story. Since the US has spent the last few weeks systematically and explicitly breaking its alliances, any developed country with dependencies on American military systems is now thinking about contingency plans. The EU yesterday announced a €150bn defence loan program that mandates member countries to purchase military equipment from European producers rather than US suppliers. If Europe wants strategic autonomy it should increasingly own the infrastructure of warfare, including space-based communications. That suddenly seems more sensible than renting it from a capricious billionaire. In quantum computing news, Chinese researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) unveiled Zuchongzhi-3, a 105-qubit machine that apparently runs one million times faster than Google’s 53-qubit Sycamore computer. I reported last week that Chinese scientists allegedly overcame a key barrier to scalable photonic quantum computing. China has been investing heavily in quantum computing for a decade and the results are beginning to show. The geopolitical implications of this potential shift in global computing dominance should not be understated. Meanwhile IBM is aiming to build a large-scale fault tolerant quantum supercomputer by 2029. That feels very far away. In missile development news, Lockheed Martin announced a new modular cruise missile, designed for rapid mass-production at much lower cost - $150k versus existing equivalents at 10x the price. Western governments have spent the last few decades buying smaller numbers of increasingly elaborate and expensive weapons systems. But the Russian invasion of Ukraine has shown that low-cost mass munitions are able to defeat high-cost sophisticated platforms. And real wars against near-peers use enormous quantities of munitions (Ukraine produced roughly 2m drones last year). This is a shift back toward the kind of industrial-scale warfare that Western militaries haven’t had to think about since the Cold War. As Joseph Stalin once said, quantity has its own quality. FUNDRAISING Alpine Eagle, a Germany-based developer of airborne systems to detect and intercept hostile drones, raised a €10m Seed round. Alpine Eagle is an Expeditions portfolio company. Shield AI, a US-based developer of drones and AI software for military use, raised a $240m round. Epirus, a US-based developer of advanced microwave technology designed to disable drones, raised a $200m Series D round. Quantexa, a UK-based developer of fraud detection and risk analysis technology, raised a $175m Series F round. Specter Ops, a US-based developer of cyberattack simulation technology, raised a $75m round. Zeitview, US-based developer of AI and drones to inspect critical infrastructure, raised a $60m round.
JOBS Alpine Eagle is looking for robotics and computer vision engineers. Scale AI is looking for a business development manager. Applied Intuition is looking for a growth lead. Anduril is looking for a deputy operations manager.
There will be no newsletter next week. But I’ll be back the following week with more dual-use updates for you.
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