August 2026 Edition

August had a strange rhythm to it. The buying accelerated and everything around the buying stalled.

On August 25 the Army committed up to $2.2 billion to put nuclear microreactors on five installations. Antares Nuclear drew Fort Bragg. Golden Dome pushed task orders out the door on the 4th and again on the 13th. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission closed comment on a framework that would cut microreactor licensing to somewhere between six and twelve months.

In the same month, the sixty-day negotiating window opened by the Islamabad Memorandum expired on August 17 with nothing to replace it. Congress left town having passed two different continuing resolutions, one running to December 4 and one to December 11, with no plan to reconcile the week between them before the fiscal year closes on September 30.

Procurement is moving faster than the authorities underneath it. Worth watching which one gives first.

More on the thesis over at Investing in Organized Chaos.

Cyrus is proud to support transformative companies building the physical backbone of American dominance:

Portfolio Spotlight

Arbor Energy

Arbor continues building toward first grid connection in 2028, with the ramp running through 2030 toward a stated goal of 10 gigawatts of new capacity annually thereafter. In a month where the Army signed contracts to put reactors on five bases and the NRC moved to compress microreactor licensing by years, the case for firm generation that does not wait on a transmission queue keeps getting easier to make.

Icarus

The Army told the Icarus story in its own words on August 23. A DVIDS feature tracked the company from an idea to full-scale prototypes deployed with Soldiers at Multi-Domain Task Force experimentation events, confirming roughly 50 employees, a progression from TRL 3 to TRL 7, and a move into larger manufacturing facilities. APOLLO flies above 60,000 feet for persistent ISR, communications relay, and data backhaul. The aircraft cost roughly $100,000 each and are designed to be built by the thousands, which is the number that matters. Persistent stratospheric ISR only becomes a mission area when the airframe is cheap enough to lose.

Volund Manufacturing

The FY2027 request puts $16.85 billion into asset purchases and industrial signal and another $13.53 billion into contested logistics. Those two lines describe an enormous number of airframes, and every one of them needs propulsion. Volund is finalizing a 100-pound-thrust-class turbojet out of Huntington Beach, targeting hundreds of engines per year by the end of 2027 and thousands per year by the end of 2028. Eric and Ken built the team out of Anduril, Blue Origin, and Apple, which is the right pedigree for a problem that is about manufacturing rate rather than engine design.

Investment Opportunities & Updates

Antares Nuclear

The Army announced Janus awards on August 25, assigning five vendors to five installations. Antares drew Fort Bragg, alongside BWXT at Fort Campbell, General Atomics at Fort Hood, Radiant at Fort Benning, and Westinghouse at Fort Drum. The Army is investing up to a combined $2.2 billion across fiscal years 2027 through 2031 on milestone-based payments, with reactors contractor-owned and operated, more than 20 expected across Department of War installations, and the first one live on a base by September 30, 2028. Antares declined to disclose its individual contract value; Bramble told Axios that combined Army, Air Force, and Space Force work now puts the company on the order of a billion dollars and growing. For scale, Radiant disclosed its own Janus contract at $750 million for 15 units.

In June, Bramble laid out three commitments: criticality in 2026, electricity in 2027, power to the warfighter in 2028. Two months later there is a base name attached to the third one. Dr. Rian Bahran joined as Chief Nuclear Officer on July 28 from the Department of Energy, where he was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Reactors. That is the hire a company makes when it stops demonstrating and starts fielding.

Anduril Industries

At Valiant Shield 2026 from August 20 to 23, Anduril demonstrated a prototype Battle Manager for the Guam Defense System, under six months after contract award. Lattice fused Army, Air Force, Navy, and Missile Defense Agency assets into one real-time picture, tracking weapons status and live interceptor inventories and issuing autonomous engagement recommendations. Last month the constraint on American power in the Middle East turned out to be interceptor inventory. This month a portfolio company fielded software whose entire job is knowing what inventory remains and spending it well.

Separately, the first Ohio-built Fury rolled off the line at Arsenal-1 on July 27, three months ahead of the original assembly target, against roughly $910.5 million in capital investment and line capacity rated at up to 150 aircraft annually. Not everything moved forward: on August 21 Anduril confirmed it vacated its Seattle shipyard space after the Navy canceled the Modular Attack Surface Craft program it had been pursuing there. Programs get canceled, and it is worth noting when they do. On financing, Reuters reported in late July that Anduril is in talks on a round near $100 billion. No close has been announced and the company called the reporting well ahead of the facts.

Chaos Inc.

Chaos acquired Atropos Group on July 29, terms undisclosed. Atropos was founded in 2025 and builds unmanned aircraft for contested logistics and mission-adaptable operations, completing six design iterations, flying a one-fifth-scale prototype, and entering FAA certification inside its first year. The deal creates a CHAOS Aerospace Division under Atropos co-founder Vince Dutcavich, with co-founder Colin Carroll joining as Chief Growth Officer. The trajectory is the interesting part: Chaos started with radars and sensors, added interceptors and missiles, and now owns the airframes. A company that can sense a threat and put something in the air to meet it is selling a different product than a radar company.

Critical Loop

The California Public Utilities Commission cited Critical Loop directly in its February rulemaking directing Southern California Edison and PG&E to file Flexible Service Connection Tariff options for grid-constrained customers. Getting named in a regulatory proceeding is a different kind of validation than winning a customer. The deployments back it up: a competitive bid win optimizing onsite solar and storage against an 11 MW load at San Diego International Airport, a manufacturing customer kept running through an eight-month utility outage, and flexible service connections secured for more than 4 MW of incremental EV charging capacity in months rather than years.

Dominion Dynamics

Dominion announced on August 14 that Canada's first Autonomous Collaborative Platform is taking off, building on an initial $50 million investment toward a fully integrated sovereign uncrewed aircraft system. The company also co-launched DEPLOY on August 5 with SAAS NORTH AI, a dual-use initiative connecting founders, military leadership, and investors. Eliot is building the convening layer alongside the technology stack, which is usually a sign someone intends to define a category rather than compete inside one.

Gitai 

GitAI completed the flight model of its S3 robotic servicing satellite in June and has deferred that mission's launch to 2028 or later in order to prioritize Space-Based Interceptor deliverables. Choosing the government program over your own demonstration mission is the correct call and an expensive one.

Hemispheric AI

After emerging from stealth the company continues development on Descartes, a six-billion-parameter NeuroAI foundation model for decoding non-invasive brain activity. They have surpassed 250,000 hours of data and are planning expansions into new facilities to further expand their dataset.

Impulse Space 

Space Systems Command awarded Impulse a $28 million SBIR Phase III extension on August 12 covering VICTUS SALO 2 and 3, two additional Mira missions providing up to 850 meters per second of additional delta-v for responsive on-orbit maneuver. That follows July's NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 award, where Impulse became the first upper-stage-only provider ever to serve as a National Security Space Launch prime.

Stoke Space

NASA selected Stoke in late June for an unfunded collaboration to mature entry, descent, and landing technology for Nova's reusable second stage, providing access to Ames hypervelocity free-flight testing and NASA guidance expertise. Nova's first orbital flight remains targeted for late 2026.

Market Insights

The Army stopped studying reactors and started buying them.

The Janus awards on August 25 are the largest defense commitment to microreactors made to date: up to $2.2 billion across five vendors and five installations over fiscal years 2027 through 2031, with more than 20 reactors expected across Department of War sites and one operational by September 30, 2028. The structure matters as much as the number. Milestone-based payments mean vendors get paid on delivery rather than on schedule, and contractor ownership and operation keeps the Army out of the nuclear operator business entirely.

Regulatory posture moved the same direction. The NRC closed public comment on August 11 on a proposed framework that would allow microreactor operating licenses to issue in roughly six to twelve months. Set that against the multi-year licensing timelines that have defined the industry and the change is not incremental.

Golden Dome money is concentrating.

Two task orders landed in-window. On August 4, a second Space-Based Adjunct Missile Tracking and Interception order worth $615 million was split three ways, with Rocket Lab taking $397 million for its Flatellites platform. On August 13, a $60 million Space Data Network demonstration was divided roughly evenly among Amazon Leo for Government, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Rocket Lab, and York Space Systems.

The distribution is lopsided. SpaceX has accumulated more than $8 billion in Golden Dome awards, with a $2.29 billion Space Data Network Backbone contract and a $4.16 billion SB-AMTI award together representing roughly 91% of the largest disclosed award pool. Total program funding to date sits at $13.4 billion appropriated in FY2026 plus $24.4 billion via the 2025 reconciliation bill.

Cost estimates remain wildly unsettled, and readers should know the spread. The Pentagon's own figure moved from $175 billion to $185 billion for the current phase. The Congressional Budget Office puts it at $831 billion to $1.2 trillion over two decades. Todd Harrison at AEI models a range of $252 billion to $3.6 trillion through 2045. Those are not small differences of opinion. They reflect genuine disagreement about what the architecture actually is.

The ceasefire lapsed.

The sixty-day negotiating period established by the June Islamabad Memorandum expired on August 17 without a successor agreement. Iranian officials have since signaled a shift toward an offensive posture. The status of the Strait of Hormuz is in direct dispute, with Iranian officials describing it as closed and CENTCOM describing it as open, and that disagreement was unresolved at month end.

U.S. force posture in the region remains elevated at roughly 40,000 personnel, with the Abraham Lincoln operating off Oman, eight Arleigh Burke destroyers on station, and Patriot and THAAD batteries reinforced. No U.S. casualties were reported in the window, though absence of reporting is not the same as confirmation.

This is a readiness situation and we will describe it as one. There is no version of an expired ceasefire and a contested waterway that is good news, and nothing about it belongs in a conversation about positioning.

The budget is large and the authority behind it is not settled.

The FY2027 request totals $1.45 trillion for the Department of War, combining $1.1 trillion in discretionary funding with $350 billion in mandatory resources from reconciliation. Inside that, the Drone Dominance mandatory request totals $53.6 billion, broken into $16.85 billion for asset purchases and industrial signal, $14.4 billion for counter-UXS covering protection of more than 250 sites, $13.53 billion for contested logistics, $4.5 billion for collaborative autonomy, and $4.32 billion for force generation.

None of it is enacted. The House passed a continuing resolution on July 21 running to December 4. The Senate passed a different one on August 8 by a vote of 90 to 6, running to December 11. That week of daylight has to close before September 30. The House Appropriations defense bill, H.R. 9495, cleared in June at roughly a $1.072 trillion topline; the Senate companion has not moved through full committee.

A continuing resolution freezes spending at prior-year levels and blocks new program starts. Janus begins in FY2027. So does CCA Increment 1 procurement. The contracts signed in August assume appropriations that do not yet exist.

Until Next Time

Last month the lesson was that you cannot surge what you have not built. This month the buying started, and it started in exactly the places that lesson pointed to. Reactors on bases. Interceptor accounting software. Counter-drone at 250 sites. Engines for airframes nobody expects to recover.

What did not happen was the appropriation. Congress went home with two incompatible continuing resolutions and five weeks to reconcile them. Every contract signed in August is written against money that Congress has not yet agreed to spend.

That gap is where the risk lives right now, and it is worth saying plainly rather than burying. The demand signal has never been clearer. The funding mechanism has rarely been shakier. Companies that can hit milestones and get paid on delivery are built for this. Companies waiting on a program start are not.

Thank you for reading.

If you're in LA, reach out. Always happy to connect.

Regards,
Jordan Yashari
Founder & General Partner
Cyrus Ventures