Hadrian closed a $1.37B Series D at a $7.87B valuation, about five times its Series C mark a year earlier. The factory builder runs automated plants for Lockheed Martin, RTX and Anduril — a bet that production capacity, not any single component, is the durable strategic asset.
$14.6m. Four firms put money behind Sora Fuel this April, and the startup's pilot is now due within 24 months. The bet: a single cell that captures CO2 and converts it to syngas, bypassing the most expensive step in direct air capture.
Most recent commercial lunar landers in 2024-2025 died within their first two-week lunar night — solar power cuts out, batteries drain, and electronics freeze.
Freehand, months out of stealth, raised $75M co-led by Battery, NewRoad, PSP Growth and Nexus for autonomous agents that run supply-chain spend at Meta, Unilever, J&J, Pfizer, Dunkin' and Cardinal Health. The bet: a 21x gap between the $16B software bill and a $348B labor pool.
LifeMine closed $263M across Series D and E, led by Milky Way with Bezos and Gates as new backers, for LIFE-001: a fungal-genome calcineurin inhibitor that keeps immunosuppression but drops tacrolimus kidney damage. Reads: kidney Phase 2 and islet Phase 1b, data 2027-2028.
State Grid, with a famously allergic maintenance department, issued a 2026 embodied-AI plan for 8,500 robots: 5,000 quadrupeds, 3,000 dual-arm robots and 500 humanoids. The 6.8B yuan (~$1B) order is the largest on record, and it shifts grid inspection from a labor line to a capex line.
Big tech has committed more than 9.8 GW to small modular reactors for AI data centers. NuScale holds the only NRC certification, X-energy pulled a billion-dollar IPO, and Antares closed $470 million. Here is how to weigh the developers, fuel suppliers and rate-base players this cycle.
Eclipse Space left stealth on June 26, founded by the people who scaled Starlink. The next build is fabless: design the satellite and keep the IP, assemble it in-country with a local partner. First hardware ships before end-2026, the demo satellite flies in 2027.
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