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NEWS Pete Hegseth announces new way of buying drones Pete Hegseth released a video, posted on X, in which he announced a Pentagon memo ‘Unleashing US Military Drone Dominance’. The video featured unauthorised use of music by Metallica as a background track. Metallica then requested that he remove the music, so he was forced to delete the original video and re-upload it with no backing track. Beyond the copyright infringement and stumbling delivery, this is an insight into the current thinking in the Pentagon. There is a growing realisation that drone technology will redefine military doctrine. The US is ahead of its Western allies in this thinking. But not ahead of Ukraine, which created the Unmanned Systems Force (USF) as a separate branch of its armed forces in June 2024. The American approach, by contrast, is to fast-track drone production and deployment, allowing commanders to procure and test them independently. The US is probably thinking of China, not Ukraine, with this change of approach. I wrote recently about China as a defence-tech superpower. It is leading the world with some of its military innovation - a fact that hasn’t escaped the people in the Pentagon. France & UK agree to coordinate use of nuclear weapons The two countries agreed to deepen their nuclear cooperation and work more closely than ever before on nuclear deterrence. The respective deterrents of both countries remain under national control ‘but can be coordinated,’ in response to major threats against the European continent. What this means in practice is that France and the UK could fire simultaneous nuclear missiles at the same adversary, either at the same target or across multiple targets. This has the effect of increasing the number of nuclear warheads that are available to each country, as they would be able to rely on the other to assist in a nuclear strike. I wrote last week that the UK may be exploring nuclear alternatives, since it is heavily reliant on American-made trident missiles for its deterrent. This latest development seems to confirm that hypothesis. A narco-sub remote-controlled via Starlink The Colombian Navy announced the seizure of an unmanned narco-submarine equipped with a Starlink antenna. The vessel was found off Colombia’s Caribbean coast and is believed to be a test run for drug smuggling using remote-controlled technology. This is proof that satellite technology is the most dual of all dual-use technologies. And also that cartels are early adopters. Many of them are already using FPV drones for reconnaissance and ambushes. NATO tests Baltic Sea drones to track Russian ships US-based Saildrone deployed a handful of unmanned surface vessels as part of NATO’s Task Force X demonstration in the Baltic Sea, which helped detect and track Russian shadow-fleet vessels operating in the area. This follows the news that the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark (EIFO) invested $60m into Saildrone in May 2025. Saildrone has been operating its fleet of USVs for years and is sitting on a huge repository of data as a result. This is straight out of the Tesla playbook for value creation. Customers of Saildrone pay it to deploy floating sensors, while the company harvests the data. Each mission improves the algorithm, and each new partner becomes both a customer and a data source. A neat business model. FUNDRAISING Varda Space, an American company that manufactures pharmaceuticals in space and returns them to Earth, aiming to produce drugs that are difficult or impossible to make in normal gravity, raised a $187m Series C round co-led by Natural Capital and Shrug Capital. Exein, an Italian developer of embedded IoT security solutions for connected devices, that embeds cybersecurity tech directly into chipsets to protect connected devices and edge infrastructure, raised a €70m Series C round led by Balderton. RealSense, an American Intel spinout that builds 3D vision cameras which enable robots and security systems to see depth in their surroundings and understand their environment, raised a $50m Series A round. XTEND, an American-Israeli startup that builds AI-powered autonomous robotic systems for defense and emergency response, raised a $30m Series B extension. Aliya Capital Partners and Protego Ventures were the co-leads. QuiX Quantum, a Dutch builder of photonic quantum computers that use light-based chips to help research labs and government agencies run advanced simulations and computations, raised a €15m Series A round co-led by Invest-NL and EIC Fund. LGND, an American startup that helps companies analyze and query satellite and geospatial data using vector embeddings, raised a $9m seed round led by Javelin Venture Partners. Apolink, an American developer of a real-time connectivity network for satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO), raised $4.3m in seed funding, with Y Combinator and others participating. Tencore, a Ukrainian developer of battlefield-ready unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), raised $3.74m in seed funding led by MITS Capital. Bifrost Electronics, an American developer of quantum amplifiers that are designed to improve the reliability and scalability of quantum computing hardware, raised a $2.5m seed round led by Caruso Ventures.
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