Two things happened in the past ten days that belong in the same sentence, though nobody filed them that way. Private investors put $26 million into software that finds hidden capacity inside the electric grid, and the industry logged a second straight record year of global nuclear generation. Neither reads as a defense story. Both are one now. Over the past two weeks the federal government stopped treating electricity as a utility problem and started treating it as a weapons program: reactors going onto Army bases, foreign-made hardware pulled out of the grid by emergency order. Capital is already moving to the same map. This is the clearest sign yet that energy has become the defense sector’s next procurement lane, and most investors are still pricing it as clean tech.
The Deep Dive
The buyer moved first
On August 26 the Army named five companies to build nuclear microreactors at five installations under its Janus program, through other transaction agreements worth up to a combined $2.2 billion, paid against milestones through fiscal 2031. Westinghouse goes to Fort Drum in New York. Antares Nuclear goes to Fort Bragg. BWXT goes to Fort Campbell. General Atomics goes to Fort Hood. Radiant goes to Fort Benning. The program launched in late 2025 and traces back to executive direction from the spring of that year, so it is not new; we flagged Janus in December, when the Army named nine candidate sites. What is new is that the Army stopped studying microreactors and started buying them, at five sites, on the same day.
For a decade, advanced nuclear had a demand problem, not a technology problem. The reactors worked on paper and the customers stayed hypothetical. A base commander who wants power that keeps running when the commercial grid goes dark is not a hypothetical customer. The Army has now signaled it will pay for resilience directly, install by install, rather than wait for utilities to build it.
The number that matters is eight
Westinghouse says its eVinci unit is designed to run for eight years or more without refueling. A base that can generate its own power for eight years is a base that cannot be coerced by taking down the local grid, cannot be held hostage by a fuel-logistics chain, and does not go dark when the transmission lines around it fail or get attacked. That is the whole point of putting a reactor behind the fence. It is not cheaper power. It is power an adversary cannot reach. For an investor, that reframes the entire underwriting question. The value is not levelized cost. The value is assured availability, and assured availability is something a defense customer will pay a premium for and write into a requirement. Every generation technology that can credibly promise it, from microreactors to long-duration storage to on-site fuel cells, inherits that premium.
The grid became a national emergency
The same day, August 26, the White House signed an order declaring a national emergency over the country’s bulk-power system and moving to block foreign-produced grid equipment: large transformers, inverters, circuit breakers, industrial control systems, and grid-scale batteries tied to a list of embargoed and adversary states. The stated reasons were cyber backdoors and supply-chain dependence. The government’s position is that hardware sitting inside the grid can carry digital backdoors, and that a transformer built by an adversary is a standing intrusion, not just a procurement risk. The Department of Energy has 120 days to write the rules.
One order puts generation onto defense sites the government controls. The other pulls untrusted hardware out of the civilian grid the government depends on. Both treat electrons as terrain. Both assume the grid is contested. Neither is a subsidy program dressed up in security language. They are security programs that happen to be about power.
Capital is following the electrons
Venture capital reached the same conclusion from the other direction. On September 1 Gridsight, a Sydney-based company whose software helps utilities find capacity that already exists on their networks instead of building new lines, raised $26 million in a Series B led by Insight Partners. The pitch is blunt: as much as three-quarters of grid capacity can sit unused because congestion moves by place and time, and AI data centers plus electrification are about to make every spare megawatt valuable. On the same day, an Indian maker of silicon carbide chargers and inverters raised $4 million with a stated order book five times its revenue run rate.
Add the record global nuclear generation the World Nuclear Association reported on Monday, 2,702 terawatt-hours in 2025 and a second consecutive record. The constraint on both defense and AI is now the same constraint: firm, secure, controllable power. The companies that generate it, the companies that squeeze more out of existing wires, and the companies that keep foreign code out of both are converging into one investable category.
Why this is not the last nuclear cycle
Skeptics have seen advanced nuclear hype before, and they are right to flinch. The difference this time is the buyer. In the last cycle the customer was a regulated utility weighing a twenty-year rate case. In this one the customer is a service branch with a mission requirement, an appropriation, and a base it fully controls. That shortens the path from prototype to revenue in a way clean-tech economics never could. It also changes who wins. The advantage moves to teams that can satisfy a defense customer’s timeline, security requirements, and site constraints, not to whoever has the lowest projected cost per kilowatt-hour in 2035.
The Investment Takeaway. We think energy resilience is the most underpriced dual-use category in the market, because the buyer just became a first mover instead of a laggard. That reprices the whole stack. Generation is investable, from microreactors to long-duration storage. The grid-software layer is investable, because utilities now have to expose capacity and secure it at once. And the hardware-trust layer, the transformers and controllers that the emergency order just turned into a compliance mandate, is investable on a clock the government is setting. New North Ventures is underwriting energy the way we underwrite defense autonomy: as a category where the customer is real, the money is appropriated, and the timeline is short. Disclosure: our founder is co-founder and chairman of StarCube, a microreactor company, so read our conviction here with that interest in view.
The Funding Ledger
A quiet week for headline size, a loud one for direction. Nearly every notable round on September 1 sat in physical infrastructure or the defense economics around it.
Gridsight, $26 million Series B, led by Insight Partners. Software that helps utilities unlock unused capacity on existing grids.
Incera Solution, about $10 million Series A, led by SV Investment. Precision steering optics for satellite laser communication and defense pointing systems.
Kepler Aerospace, $8 million seed, led by Blue Ashva Capital. A vertically integrated satellite-and-intelligence stack aimed at defense and security customers.
Airbility, roughly $5 million Series A, led by Sazze Partners. Interceptor drones built to defeat hostile drones at a fraction of a missile’s cost.
xorlab, 5 million euros Series A extension, led by Spicehaus Partners. Behavior-based email security pitched on European data sovereignty.
Zenergize, $4 million pre-Series A, led by Giraffe Studios. Silicon carbide EV chargers and solar inverters, with a stated order book five times its revenue run rate.
Read the pattern, not the deals. Four of these six make something physical: optics, satellites, interceptors, power hardware. The two software rounds sell scarcity of a different kind: one finds capacity inside existing wires, the other sells European data sovereignty. Separately, Smack Technologies, a US startup building edge AI for dismounted troops, including a wrist-worn display still in prototype, drew coverage this week for the $61 million Series B it closed in August, and Palantir CEO Alex Karp agreed to be first lead investor in a still-unnamed defense-tech company from Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s defense minister until July, on undisclosed terms. Money is moving toward companies that own a hard, defensible piece of the real world, and away from thin wrappers on someone else’s model. None of the six is American. The lead checks came from Insight Partners and Sazze Partners in the United States and Spicehaus in Zurich as often as from local funds, while the builders sit in Australia, South Korea, India, and Switzerland. That gap is its own investment thesis for anyone underwriting the domestic industrial base.
The Northeast Desk
New Hampshire. GKN Aerospace is expanding its North Charlestown plant, a $16 million project announced in July that adds around 57,000 square feet and triples the site’s footprint, with a dedicated production cell for compressor blades and vanes for current and future engine programs. GKN says it means new skilled jobs but has not put a number on them, and it is still a jobs story as much as a parts story, in a town most defense readers could not find on a map. On August 31 the Pentagon signed seven-year framework agreements with Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics’ Ordnance and Tactical Systems unit to triple Patriot PAC-3 MSE and quadruple THAAD production, and that demand runs straight down into small New Hampshire suppliers such as Manchester’s Vibrac Precision Test Systems, which we profiled last month.
Southern New England. The region’s marquee defense gathering, SENEDIA’s Defense Innovation Days, ran August 31 to September 2 in Newport, its twelfth year, with workforce development as the headline theme and more than 400 people in the room. General Dynamics Electric Boat, which already employs more than 27,000 people across Groton, Quonset Point, and New London, is targeting about 8,000 new hires this year to build Virginia and Columbia-class submarines under the $76.6 billion award it shares with HII Newport News, booked July 29 and covered here last month. On August 24 Electric Boat and the New England Institute of Technology said they will triple the Warwick, Rhode Island training center from 30,000 to 100,000 square feet, with $20 million from the Navy’s submarine industrial base program and $25 million from Electric Boat, to push roughly 3,000 hires a year through it. The submarine industrial base does not have a capital problem. It has a people problem, and it is trying to hire its way out of it at a scale that reshapes the labor market from Rhode Island to eastern Connecticut. The same squeeze runs north to Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, where attack-submarine overhauls compete for the same welders and machinists. For a fund that spends its days on software valuations, the binding constraint in the region’s largest defense enterprise turns out to be skilled trades.
Watch the calendar. On Wednesday, September 16, BENS is convening leaders from across New Hampshire’s national security ecosystem, including industry, academia, and federal and state government, for a breakfast in southern New Hampshire on opportunities to strengthen the state’s role in America’s national security and economic competitiveness. New North Ventures is helping host, and jeremy@newnorthventures.com is the contact if you would like to be there. The NH Tech Alliance’s Cybersecurity Summit is Thursday, September 10 at Manchester Community College, its Innovation Summit is October 6 in Nashua, and the Defense Investment Forum runs October 27 and 28 in Middletown, Rhode Island, which is where the SENEDIA crowd reconvenes this fall.
Portfolio Corner: CrunchAtlas
The grid the government just declared a national emergency still has to be defended one network at a time. That is the business CrunchAtlas is in. The company builds AI-driven active cyber defense for critical infrastructure, the kind of monitor, detect, evaluate, and act loop that operators need once an intruder is already inside the fence. Its framing, drawn from founder Ben Faberlle’s appearance on our Securing Our Future podcast last fall, is that detection alone is no longer the job. Attackers adapt, so defenders have to respond at machine speed, not analyst speed.
The regulatory wind is at their back. Federal regulators approved a reliability standard last year requiring internal network security monitoring inside utility networks, with compliance deadlines in 2028 and 2030. Translated, the country’s utilities are being told to watch the traffic already moving inside their walls, not just guard the perimeter. That is precisely the visibility gap active defense is built to close, and this week’s emergency order only sharpens the point: if a transformer can carry a backdoor, the monitoring has to assume the adversary is already home.
CrunchAtlas is early and deliberately quiet, and we are going to respect that here rather than put numbers on the table the company has not disclosed. If energy is now defense infrastructure, then the software watching that infrastructure from the inside is a defense product, and the buyers, the utilities and the operators, are the same customers the rest of this issue is about. New North Ventures backed the company early for exactly that reason.
More links to explore
The Army’s $2.2 billion Janus microreactor awards, at National Defense Magazine and Federal News Network.
The executive order declaring a bulk-power national emergency, at The Record and pv magazine USA.
Palantir and Anduril lock in a $192 million production order for eight Army TITAN systems, at Breaking Defense.
Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics get framework deals to surge Patriot and THAAD, at Defense News.
Gridsight raises $26 million to find hidden capacity in the grid, in the company’s own announcement.