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The Golden Dome may still be far off, but defense tech companies are already jockeying for a piece of the $175 billion missile defense initiative, Axios Future of Defense reporter Colin Demarest says.
The big picture: Demarest went inside the defense-tech boom and the future of dealmaking in a live conversation with Axios Pro managing editor George Moriarty.
- Demarest touched on neoprimes, the prominence of software-defined hardware and what investors should focus on.
Watch the full conversation here.
This has been edited for length and clarity.
Moriarty: Can you put the Golden Dome and the opportunities for investors and dealmakers into perspective?
- Demarest: "Golden Dome plays are happening now, while everyone's still trying to figure out what's actually going on. But in terms of deals and kind of places to look in the future…there's a lot of meat on the bone."
This morning you had an exclusive on an $11 million deal for Poseidon. And at Future of Defense, you had Paul Kwan from General Catalyst describe the funding environment not as a bubble, but as a brush fire. How do you see the funding environment?
- "There's definitely a fervor out there. The valuations keep getting bigger as well, and that has driven my line of questioning of like, are we in a bubble? Is this sustainable?"
Zeroing in on Firefly, what did that acquisition bring to them and what might companies be looking forward to bringing in?
- "I think there's going to be a huge focus on space. Obviously, Golden Dome is a very space-forward project."
- "Golden Dome is a very interesting mix of physical and digital and that kind of loops back, not to make it a big circle, but like that, kind of also brings it back to our discussion about software-defined hardware.
