Badland Batteries' Navy-backed drone cell plant opens after its 2025 production goal passed

The Army Applications Laboratory has awarded Havoc a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase III contract, the Providence, R.I., collaborative autonomy software company announced Monday. The award will fund continued development of Havoc's software for logistics resupply across multiple hardware platforms. Under the contract, Havoc says, it will expand its multi-domain capabilities to orchestrate resupply deliveries to soldiers by air and ground.¹

Havoc's chief executive, Paul Lwin, said the Phase III designation means any federal agency, "not just the Department of War, can now bring Havoc on board through a streamlined, non-competitive path."¹ Phase III is the SBIR program's commercialization stage, where a company can market what it developed in Phase II to government or commercial buyers.² Havoc's backers include defense contractors: the company raised a $100 million Series A in May, with SAIC joining existing investors including Lockheed Martin.⁴

The Army lists Havoc as a winner of xTechOverwatch, a competition that sought concepts for autonomous aircraft, ground vehicles and sensor networks from small businesses.² In August, during the competition's Pegasus Charge III exercise at Fort Hood, Texas, Havoc and Rune Technologies completed an end-to-end autonomous resupply mission with Havoc's drones and Rune's TyrOS software, the companies said.³ Havoc says the expanded air and ground work responds to a need identified by its 1st Cavalry Division customer at Overwatch/Pegasus Charge.¹

Kapta Space, a Seattle developer of spaceborne radar payloads, announced the $24 million round on Friday, Oct. 9, with Bison Ventures as co-lead. Kapta says the money will help it scale production to support multiple classified moving target indication (MTI) contracts it secured earlier this year. The round brings its total funding to $30 million.¹

The technology it wants to produce has a public research trail. In July 2023, DARPA funded a $1.7 million Direct to Phase II Small Business Innovation Research contract for a steerable X-band metasurface antenna.^2–3 The award's abstract set out to develop spaceborne radar imaging and MTI sensor technology.² USAspending lists the work, which ended in July 2025, as a "Space Metamaterial Electronically Scanned Array," matching the name of Kapta's MESA architecture.^{1, 3}

Conventional radar payloads, Kapta says, have been too costly and complex to deploy across large satellite constellations. MESA is designed to deliver advanced radar performance at significantly lower cost, power and manufacturing complexity than traditional active electronically scanned arrays, the company says.¹

Washington Harbour is a Washington, D.C., private investment firm whose investments run from growth equity to control buyouts. Mina Faltas, its founder and chief executive, said the firm believes MESA's combination of performance, cost and scalability will make Kapta "a foundational supplier to the next generation of U.S. and allied space architectures."¹