introducing spike: low-cost autonomous air defense [prototype field test 0]

The buried number: the Defense Autonomous Working Group goes from $226M this year to $54.6B next year. That is a 242x increase for one office. The Pentagon just quietly admitted that the Iran war exposed a capability gap that requires a Manhattan Project-sized response. $54B doesn't get absorbed by AVAV, KTOS, and Anduril alone. This is a new tier of defense primes forming in real time. The counter-drone market is about to mint its first $100B company.

ok - dropping big dates/news for a16z speedrun: - starting TODAY, founders can apply for the 2026 program that runs July 27 to Oct 11 in SF here's the link: speedrun007.a16z.com/ac - we will be investing up to $1M and funding 70 companies over the next few weeks - But there's also $5M in credits/tokens/etc from AWS/GCP/Open AI/Azure/NVIDIA/Deel/Stripe/etc. You'll also work with our amazing operating team (GTM, talent, brand, people, and more), and join our community of elite founders - we offer a Global Founders Program for international founders, to help with visas, banking support, relo recommendations - yes you can be solo (but better if you're further along, and have built a team). No you don't have to have an idea yet. Yes you have to know how to build (even if you're not technical) - Also, in other news: speedun is officially moving full-time to SF. (prev it alternated SF/LA) this is for all the obv reasons - we've continued to have an insane lineup of speakers, including the founders of Carta / DoorDash / Twilio / Figma / Zynga / Airtable / Twitch / and of course, lunch/dinners with Marc/Ben alongside a16z team - and much more - the deadline for applying is May 17!