Issue #67 | Building the NatSec Tracker

Defense Tech Signals

Issue #67 | Building the NatSec100 Tracker

Editor’s Brief

Last Week's chart put SVDG’s 2026 NatSec100 on one page: about $73 billion in private capital against roughly $14 billion in federal obligations since FY2020. Only 8 of 95 companies have been obligated more than they’ve raised.

If you want deeper reads on any of these companies, the DTS Archive Page has past issues on several, including X-Bow, Castelion, Saronic, Allen Control Systems, and more.

I spent this week turning the snapshot into a tracker that updates on a biweekly basis and will begin to add more companies outside of the “Top 100” list. Just a quick note on how its updated and omissions from the chart for this week.

The Dashboard refreshes the data every other Monday:

• Contracts, grants and subawards come from the USAspending API, one fiscal year at a time.

• Other Transactions come from FPDS’s public feed, searched by each company’s UEI.

• Companies are matched by legal entity name and UEI, not brand. Govini’s awards sit under Poplicus Inc. Forterra’s sit under Robotic Research OpCo, etc.

• Large changes are held for review. Anything that moves a company’s total by $25M or 25% requires manual review

• FY2027 has its own column, so the published FY2020–FY2026 baseline stays comparable while new money comes in.

• DoD reporting delay. Most defense contract data publishes 90 days after award, so FY2027 figures will skew toward NASA and civilian agencies until early next year [and it’s also the reason for the biweekly update timeline].

Omissions

• Acquisitions. Anduril, Shield AI, Forterra and others have bought multiple companies, and a subscriber pointed out that those acquired companies can keep winning work under their own names. For Example: Blue Force Technologies, the original Fury developer now owned by Anduril, appears as a subcontractor on four Boeing contracts worth close to $2M in FY2025. I’m still matching acquisition dates against award dates, because only money won after an acquisition closes should count toward the parent.

• Consortium OTs. Many prototype OTs run through consortium managers, and FPDS lists the manager as the vendor. The manager takes a fee and work can be split across members, so there’s no reliable way to attribute totals to individual companies.

• Reseller and marketplace sales. Software sold through resellers, such as Chainguard or Grafana, shows up under the reseller, not the company.

• Subcontracts. Subaward data depends on primes reporting it, and only first-tier subawards are required. Anything deeper in the supply chain is invisible.

• Loans and equity. Government financing isn’t purchasing, so it’s excluded by design. CesiumAstro’s roughly $465M in EXIM loans and Vulcan Elements’ DoD/Commerce loan-and-equity deal don’t count as obligations.

New to Defense Tech Signals? Start here.

• Who’s Actually Getting Paid in Defense Tech?
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• The Shipbuilding Crisis — Part 1 · Part 2 · Part 3
  Why there’s no commercial maritime base to “restore,” and what a fix would require.

• Solid Rocket Motors — Part 1: X-Bow · Part 2: Ursa Major · Part 3: Ammonium Perchlorate
  New entrants, vertical integration, and the AP supply bottleneck.

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