Vast's $500M round is the largest vote of confidence yet in the commercial race to replace the ISS — but raising the money and flying the station are different problems, as an August 2026 layoff showed.
Defence-robotics capital is concentrating into a two-tier stack: platforms buying scale through M&A at the top, governments seeding the base through grants, and standalone mid-stage firms caught in the squeeze.
Chevron spent three years designing a federally funded machine to pull carbon from the California sky, then walked away in silence for eleven months.
Aura Life Science wants bugs that eat light instead of sugar. We debate whether photosynthetic biomanufacturing can actually beat precision fermentation for biologics.
Velatir raised EUR5M to build a sovereign European control layer for enterprise AI, betting governance and the EU AI Act beat raw model capability as the durable investment.
The $626B space economy mapped segment by segment: 78% commercial revenue, $132B in government anchor spending, venture capital concentrating into megarounds, GEO operators in decline, and orbital compute still waiting on a 10x launch-cost drop.
The first ground-autonomy company to hold a prime production contract with the U.S. military isn't a defense giant — it's Overland AI, a Seattle startup. A $20M APFIT award puts a dozen autonomous vehicles on MADIS air-defense resupply runs, with deliveries starting in early 2027.
Westinghouse has 91 AP1000 units in its order pipeline and a new engineering partner to build them. The Amentum deal, $17.5B in DOE loans and a planned IPO turn nuclear from a licensing problem into a delivery problem.