Helsing

Airbus

Defense Tech

Airbus is Europe's largest aerospace company, spanning commercial aircraft, helicopters, defence and space. In civil aviation it remains Boeing's only true peer at global scale and is pairing near-term production growth with longer-term work on lower-carbon aircraft technologies, future single-aisle designs and hydrogen propulsion. The company combines a mature global airliner business with broader aerospace capabilities across defence, space and rotorcraft. Q1 2026 was unusually weak - 114 deliveries (vs. 136 a year earlier), revenue down 7% to EUR 12.65B and adjusted EBIT halved to EUR 300M due to Pratt & Whitney engine shortages and Chinese delivery disruptions - but Airbus reaffirmed full-year 2026 guidance of ~870 deliveries, EUR 7.5B adjusted EBIT and EUR 4.5B free cash flow, with a record commercial backlog above 9,000 aircraft. Output recovered strongly through mid-year: official figures reported July 10 showed 351 deliveries in H1 2026 (up ~15% YoY), Airbus's best first half since 2019, and the backlog stood at 9,216 aircraft at end-June. At a measured Farnborough Airshow (July 20-24, 2026) Airbus booked roughly 157 firm commercial orders plus commitments (of a show-wide $84.7B / 353 firm aircraft), headlined by SMBC Aviation Capital's 100 A320neo-family jets, VietJet's 20 A330neos (~$7.4B), and new A350-1000 orders from Riyadh Air and Philippine Airlines, with CEO Guillaume Faury reaffirming the ~870-delivery full-year target. On July 26 Airbus announced a EUR 5B share buyback and raised medium-term targets, and on July 29 it reported H1 2026 results: revenue up 12% YoY to EUR 33.2B on 351 deliveries, powered by a record Q2 (237 deliveries, +39% YoY). Airbus's official July tally, published August 7, showed the delivery pace cooling further to 67 aircraft (39 customers) and 204 gross orders, taking YTD deliveries to 418 versus 373 at the same point in 2025 - still 51 aircraft ahead of Boeing (367 YTD) but below the roughly 85-90/month cadence needed to reach the 870-aircraft target. August's official tally showed a further cooldown to 47 aircraft delivered to 31 customers and 46 gross orders (including airBaltic firming 10 more A220-300s), taking YTD deliveries to 465 - now requiring an average of roughly 100 aircraft a month over the final four months of the year to hit the 870-aircraft guidance. Part of the August softness traces to a production quality issue on the A330neo: Airbus found a stray tool and other quality lapses on the horizontal tail plane (assembled at its Getafe plant) that nearly halted A330neo deliveries for three months - zero handed over in June and July, just one in August, to Starlux Airlines - before Airbus said in early September the root cause was identified, the issue was isolated and unrelated to the Spain labor dispute, and deliveries had resumed. Two other supply and schedule risks continue to shadow the ramp: Airbus's dispute with Pratt & Whitney over shorted A320neo engine deliveries has hardened into a formal damages claim that could go to arbitration, and the A350F freighter has now penciled in a tentative first-flight date around September 24, 2026 (reports August 19-20), with first delivery still targeted for the second half of 2027 - a tight but so-far-unrevised schedule given typical 12-15 month flight-test campaigns. Airbus also confirmed two divisional leadership changes already in effect this year (Lars Wagner as Commercial Aircraft CEO since January, Matthieu Louvot as Airbus Helicopters CEO since April) and a board chair transition, with Amparo Moraleda succeeding Rene Obermann on October 1, 2026. Thousands of Airbus workers in Spain resumed an indefinite strike the week of August 24 after rejecting a pay offer; on August 31 workers voted 81% to keep striking rather than suspend it, and on September 1 SIMA-mediated talks with the three unions leading the walkout (CGT, UGT, UTIL) broke down without agreement, so Airbus shifted to a parallel negotiating track with non-striking unions (CCOO, SIPA, ATP) while the indefinite strike, and its drag on production, continued into early September with no resolution yet. On the defense side, Airbus also picked up two notable wins in mid-to-late August: a $115 million U.S. Army contract (option for two more) for 10 UH-72B Lakota helicopters announced August 14, and a EUR 5.4 billion (~$6.3B) Spain-Poland framework agreement approved by Spain's Council of Ministers on August 25 for the joint procurement of seven A330 MRTT tankers (three for Spain, four for Poland) under the EU's SAFE instrument, to be assembled at Airbus's Getafe site with Polish deliveries targeted by 2030 and definitive contracts still to be negotiated. Airbus's stock has held up despite the noise, with a market cap of roughly $190B in mid-August 2026. Separately, on August 29, 2026 the Financial Times reported that Airbus is reviewing its US small-satellite manufacturing business at Merritt Island, Florida (more than 200 staff and several hundred million dollars in annual revenue), with a sale among the options; Airbus confirmed the review and said it is separate from its planned European space combination with Leonardo and Thales.

Amazon Leo

Defense Tech

Amazon Leo - Amazon's satellite division, launched as Project Kuiper in 2019 and rebranded November 13, 2025 - is a low Earth orbit broadband network for customers and communities beyond the reach of existing terrestrial infrastructure. Led by VP Rajeev Badyal from Redmond, Washington, it combines thousands of satellites built at a Kirkland factory (up to five per day), a global ground network integrated with AWS, and a three-terminal hardware lineup: Leo Nano, Leo Pro, and Leo Ultra. The enterprise beta went live April 8, 2026 with partners including Verizon, AT&T, Vodafone, JetBlue, and NASA; after ULA's final Atlas V flight (LA-08) on July 2, 2026, about 396 production satellites are in orbit and Amazon says it has enough capacity to open commercial service in late 2026. The FCC granted a waiver June 5, 2026 for missing the July 30 50%-deployment milestone (1,618 of 3,236 satellites), imposing a temporary spectrum-priority reduction on post-July-30 satellites until March 2028. The $11.57B Globalstar acquisition (expected to close 2027) adds direct-to-device capability, Delta signed for a 500-aircraft Wi-Fi rollout beginning 2028, and a July 2026 deal makes South Africa's Herotel the first African ISP to distribute Leo residential service ('evry, powered by Amazon Leo', launching 2027).

Anduril Industries

Defense Tech

Anduril Industries is an American defense technology company founded in 2017 by Oculus creator Palmer Luckey with Palantir veterans Brian Schimpf (CEO), Trae Stephens, Matt Grimm, and Joe Chen. Its core thesis is to build software-defined, mass-producible autonomous weapons around Lattice, an AI command-and-control platform that fuses sensor data and orchestrates fleets of unmanned systems. Its hardware now spans every domain: the Fury (FQ-44A) collaborative combat aircraft, Ghost and Bolt drones, Altius loitering munitions, Roadrunner reusable jet interceptors, Barracuda cruise missiles, Ghost Shark autonomous submarines, a new class of autonomous surface vessels built with South Korea's HD Hyundai, and the EagleEye mixed-reality soldier headset built with Meta. Anduril holds prime positions on several of the Pentagon's most-watched programs: the Air Force ordered its FQ-44A into production in June 2026 alongside General Atomics' FQ-42A, targeting at least 150 CCAs by the end of the decade, with a mission-autonomy software down-select still to come; it took over Microsoft's $22B IVAS soldier-headset program in 2025 (now SBMC) and is running a second prototype cycle after its Phase 2 hardware redesign, with an Army downselect and production decision potentially landing in fiscal 2028; it won a 10-year, $20B Army enterprise agreement for Lattice-based counter-drone command and control in March 2026; in August 2026 it demonstrated a Lattice-powered Battle Manager for the Guam Defense System at Exercise Valiant Shield, fusing Army, Air Force, Navy and Missile Defense Agency assets; and it leads an industry team prototyping Golden Dome space-based interceptors, which cleared the program's first design-review gate in August 2026. In August 2026 the Department of Homeland Security also awarded Anduril a Track 2 slot on a $1.5B, five-year counter-UAS IDIQ, though Anduril protested its exclusion from the Track 1 hardware award, with a GAO ruling due by November 20, 2026. International business is scaling too, led by Australia's A$1.7B Ghost Shark program, completed Altius-600M deliveries to Taiwan plus an August 2026 NT$26.9 billion (~$847 million) letter of offer and acceptance for 2,032 more Altius systems (1,554 Altius-700M loitering munitions and 478 Altius-600ISR, first deliveries in Q4 2026), a State Department-approved (not yet finalized) possible $1.98B Kuwait counter-drone Foreign Military Sale, and a July 2026 agreement for Poland's state defense group PGZ to build the surface-launched Barracuda-500M cruise missile locally - Anduril's first European production site - alongside an Embraer MoU to launch palletized Barracuda-500Ms from the C-390. Manufacturing is anchored by Arsenal-1, a $1B, 5-million-square-foot Ohio factory where the first Ohio-built Fury rolled off the line on July 27, 2026, months ahead of schedule, with Roadrunner, Barracuda, and a classified platform slated to join the line by year-end. Revenue roughly doubled in 2025 to $2.2B (2026 guidance points to roughly $4.3B), and the company raised a $5B Series H at a $61B valuation in May 2026, bringing total funding above $11B; reports since late July 2026 of a further round at roughly a $100B valuation remain unconfirmed and had not closed as of August 26, 2026. With around 7,000 employees, Anduril is the most richly valued private defense-tech company; CEO Brian Schimpf said in July 2026 the company is in no rush to IPO.

Archer Aviation

Defense Tech

Archer Aviation is an electric aircraft company building Midnight, a piloted four-passenger eVTOL for short urban trips, while expanding into defense, powertrain sales, and aviation software. As of Q1 2026 Archer had passed 700 Midnight test flights, completed 70% of for-credit FAA flight-test points, and formally closed FAA Phase 3 in April 2026 - the first eVTOL company to do so - unlocking Type Inspection Authorization (TIA) and entering Phase 4 (formal compliance testing). In the UAE, the GCAA transitioned Midnight to a Restricted Type Certificate (RTC) program on May 7, 2026, targeting initial commercial certification as early as Q3 2026 - meaning Abu Dhabi is likely to see the first Midnight passenger flights before the U.S. The critical remaining FAA milestone is a publicly demonstrated piloted transition flight (VTOL→forward-flight mode), which is slated for H2 2026 and had still not been publicly demonstrated as of August 30, 2026. U.S. operations are targeted for H2 2026 in Florida, New York, and Texas under the eIPP. Archer is also the named official air taxi provider of the 2028 LA Olympics. On July 15, 2026, Archer unveiled Zee, an aviation-specific AI foundation model trained on ADS-B, air-traffic, and flight data, extending its ambitions beyond air taxis into aviation software. On July 20, 2026 at the Farnborough Airshow, Archer and Anduril unveiled a jointly-developed autonomous, series hybrid-electric tilt-rotor VTOL platform - a defense variant, Anduril's Group 5 'Thunder' attack rotorcraft, and Archer's commercial 'Halo' variant - sending Archer shares up about 20%. On August 3, 2026, Korean Air - which agreed in October 2025 to become Archer's exclusive commercialization partner in South Korea for up to 100 Midnight aircraft - said it will lead conversion and systems integration of a militarized Midnight variant for South Korea's Advanced Air Mobility defense program, extending Archer's defense ambitions into an international export partnership. On August 10, 2026 Archer reported Q2 2026 revenue of $5M (up 213% sequentially, beating estimates) but a wider-than-expected GAAP loss of $0.34/share on a one-time litigation settlement; Adjusted EBITDA loss was $177M and total liquidity fell to about $1.6B, and the company held Q3 2026 Adjusted EBITDA guidance at a loss of $170-200M. Archer also disclosed that during the quarter the FAA approved its quality management system, enabling FAA-creditable conformity findings across the aircraft, its components, and systems - Archer says this makes it the only eVTOL OEM in Phase 4 of type certification with an accepted means of compliance, on top of more than 150 piloted Midnight test flights completed (some exceeding 50 miles). The same day, Archer announced a deal to acquire Boeing's Wisk Aero, Insitu and SkyGrid businesses in exchange for a Boeing equity stake of up to 19.75%, a transaction still subject to Hart-Scott-Rodino antitrust review and expected to close by year-end 2026.

AST SpaceMobile

Defense Tech

AST SpaceMobile is building a direct-to-cell satellite network designed to connect standard smartphones to space-based 4G and 5G service without special hardware. After proving the concept with BlueWalker 3 and launching BlueBird 1-6, the company reached 13 satellites in orbit on August 5, 2026 with the successful launch of BlueBird 11, 12 and 13, following the June 17, 2026 launch of BlueBird 8, 9 and 10. The company counts nearly 60 mobile-network-operator partners covering more than 3 billion subscribers and reported its first meaningful revenue from gateway deliveries, MNO milestones, and government work. In April 2026 the FCC granted AST commercial Supplemental Coverage from Space authority for a constellation of up to 248 satellites - its first U.S. operating license for direct-to-device service - and on August 4, 2026 AST told the FCC it had begun its first commercial service outside the US, direct-to-cell in Japan with Rakuten Mobile. BlueBird 7 was lost after an April 2026 New Glenn upper-stage issue, and on July 15, 2026 AST pushed continuous US commercial service from late 2026 to early 2027 as launch-vehicle disruptions thinned its near-term access to orbit; the company has since ramped manufacturing to as many as six fully equipped satellites per month across two Midland, Texas sites, and in early August 2026 Guinness World Records recognized its Block 2 phased array as the largest commercial communications array ever deployed in low Earth orbit. On August 6, 2026 AST said it had expanded network integration testing, subject to regulatory approvals, across eight European countries with Vodafone, Orange, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone Ukraine, using the carrier-neutral ground infrastructure of Satellite Connect Europe, its Luxembourg-based joint venture with Vodafone. At its August 10, 2026 Q2 business update, AST reported $31.5M of quarterly revenue (more than double Q1 2026) and a $230.9M GAAP net loss driven largely by a $125.9M loss on involuntary conversion tied to the BlueBird 7 de-orbit, while its contracted revenue backlog grew to about $1.3B and the company disclosed three additional U.S. government awards worth over $100M of near-term funded value across 2026-2027; full-year 2026 revenue guidance of $150M-$200M was reaffirmed. Executives said the company has 10 launches booked across two providers and is not relying on Blue Origin's New Glenn to reach its ~45-satellite early-2027 target. On August 11, 2026 AST told the FCC it would begin UK direct-to-cell operations with Vodafone 'imminently', and on August 14, 2026 the FCC granted it a 30-day special temporary authority to test Supplemental Coverage from Space service over 800 MHz spectrum on up to 100 devices. By late August 2026, BlueBird 12 and 13 had fully deployed their 2,400 sq ft phased arrays, and New Zealand carrier 2degrees officially opened its Marton satellite ground station, completing voice, video and mobile-data test sessions over standard smartphones; Berenberg initiated coverage on September 2, 2026 with a Buy rating and $92 price target as partners including US Mobile prepared to launch direct-to-cell coverage on the network.

Astroscale

Defense Tech

Astroscale is the only company in the world building a business purely around servicing what is already in orbit: removing debris, deorbiting dead satellites, extending the life of working ones, refueling them, and inspecting them. Founded in Tokyo in 2013 by Nobu Okada and listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Growth market since June 2024 under ticker 186A, it operates across Japan, the UK, the US, France, and Israel. Its ADRAS-J spacecraft made history in 2024 as the first vehicle ever to approach and photograph a large piece of orbital debris up close, a discarded Japanese rocket upper stage, and it completed operations and began its own deorbit in March 2026. JAXA has since contracted the follow-on ADRAS-J2 for roughly 12 billion yen to go back to that same rocket body and actually remove it with a robotic arm. Alongside that flagship line Astroscale is preparing ELSA-M, billed as the world's first commercial end-of-life deorbit service and now booked on Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket; LEXI, a geostationary life-extension servicer; the Astroscale U.S. Refueler, which is set to perform the first refueling of a United States Space Force asset; and ISSA-J1, a 2027 mission that will inspect two retired Japanese satellites in different orbits on a single flight. The company remains deeply loss-making: for the fiscal year ended April 30, 2026 it reported 5.94 billion yen of IFRS revenue against a 9.98 billion yen operating loss, with an order backlog of 37.94 billion yen. In June 2026 it closed a 30.6 billion yen strategic growth financing with Hulic and SKY Perfect JSAT to fund facility expansion and LEXI-P production.