Looks like there's plenty of capital to go around too. Last year, world military expenditures rose 9% to top $2.7 trillion, per think tank Sipri's estimate. It was the sharpest rise in more than 30 years. Meanwhile, in startup-land, defense tech is also sizzling. This applies to virtually every metric, including total spending, round counts, large deals and unicorn creation. In fact, global investment in defense tech has already hit a record high this year. The numbers: Funding to VC-backed startups in defense ' defined here as the industries of military, national security and law enforcement ' hit $7.7 billion across close to 100 deals in 2025, per Crunchbase data. Noteworthy recent rounds: Ultra-large rounds were key in boosting the totals. So far this year, at least 10 rounds of $200 million or more have gone to companies in defense categories, per Crunchbase data. Anduril Industries, probably the most famous defense tech startup, was also this year's top fundraiser. The Costa Mesa, California-based company closed a $2.5 billion Series G round this summer. Founders Fund led the financing, which more than doubled 8-year-old Anduril's valuation to $30.5 billion....
The largest rounds this week went to AI and defense tech companies, amid a generally busy period for big financings. Coding automation platform Cursor and parent company Anysphere led by a long shot, closing on a $2.3 billion Series D. The next-largest round was a $510 million financing for defense tech company Chaos Industries, followed by financings in sectors including AI inference, e-commerce and electric vehicles. 1. Anysphere, $2.3B, AI coding: Coding automation platform Cursor and parent company Anysphere raised $2.3 billion in a Series D financing backed by Accel, Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, Coatue, Nvidia and Google. The round set a $29.3 billion post-money valuation for the San Francisco-headquartered company, which is more than 3x higher than what it secured just six months ago. 2. Chaos Industries, $510M, defense tech: Chaos Industries, a defense tech startup focused on counter-drone radar and communication systems, announced that it secured $510 million in new funding led by Valor Equity Partners. The round sets a $4.5 billion valuation for the 3-year-old, Los Angeles-based company....
The Trump administration is by its own account devoted to stamping out obesity, cancer, and many other chronic diseases in America. But its public-health officials are also attuned to a very different sort of threat: a faulty cast of mind. 'Groupthink is the fundamental problem,' said National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya in May. The nation's scientific institutions have become hidebound. According to Bhattacharya, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and other top figures in the 'Make America Healthy Again' movement, the pandemic brought this problem to the point of crisis. A small group of elite scientists settled upon the use of masks and lockdowns to fight the coronavirus. They closed ranks around their strategies and expelled dissenters. All of this was classic groupthink, the MAHA crowd has argued: a psychological phenomenon that occurs when people's tendency to go along with the crowd prevents them from considering other courses of action. As a result, in their view, the public-health response to the coronavirus turned into catastrophe. Kids fell behind in school. Drug-overdose numbers exploded. Poor nations starved from supply-chain disruptions....
The Defense Department is notoriously picky about films that depict military and national-security issues, and understandably so. Many movies that feature the military get a lot of things wrong, including innocent flaws such as actors who are the wrong age for the rank on their costume, or scripts that invent procedures or terms that don't exist. Sometimes, the Defense Department cooperates with Hollywood and provides advice; other times, it takes a pass, especially if the subject raises touchy issues. The Navy, for example, naturally didn't want to help with Crimson Tide, deciding that the 1995 movie about a mutiny on a nuclear-missile submarine perhaps wasn't in the best interest of the naval service. Now the Pentagon is annoyed with the director Kathryn Bigelow's new movie, A House of Dynamite, a sweaty thriller about civilian and military leaders trying to cope with a surprise missile launch against the United States. It's not too much of a spoiler to note that in the early part of the movie, America launches GBIs, or ground-based interceptors, from Alaska'a system that really exists at Fort Greeley, near Fairbanks'to shoot down the mystery missile. Those interceptors miss. Twice....
