Militaries routinely send satellites to fly by rival vehicles and suss out their capabilities, but scaling up this kind of reconnaissance is increasingly seen by the US military as a challenge best handled by the private sector.

That’s why two space startups, True Anomaly and Rocket Lab, completed a rendezvous mission for the US Space Force last week so complex, it was like something out of Top Gun. Their two rival satellites met up in orbit, close enough for one to capture imagery of the other.

The exercise, dubbed Victus Haze, demonstrated the close inspection of a space vehicle soon after it arrived in orbit, a necessity in a world where the US, Russia and China are deploying novel space weapons.

“China and Russia launch capabilities to space on a regular basis and part of the Space Force’s job is to understand what those capabilities are,” True Anomaly CEO Even Rogers, a veteran of the US military’s space efforts, told TechCrunch. “Right now we have gaps in our collection capability.”

The June mission saw Rocket Lab, a rocket-building rival to SpaceX that recently announced its acquisition of Iridium, launch a spacecraft called Puma just 16 hours and 42 minutes after receiving notice, which is notable because most rocket launches are buttoned up months in advance.

A Jackal spacecraft built by True Anomaly was waiting in orbit to intercept it. As part of the exercise, the company didn’t know where Puma would arrive in space, but used onboard sensors to find and identify its target from 2,000 kilometers away. The Jackal then flew close to the target — exactly how close is classified — and orbited it, capturing imagery of different parts of the vehicle, before returning to its starting point in orbit.

True Anomaly’s CEO said that, outside of NASA and Space Force space flight missions with humans, “this is probably the most complex rendezvous and proximity operation between two spacecraft in modern history.”

Bringing together two spacecraft in orbit, where they’re both moving at speeds approaching 17,500 mph, is no easy challenge. Previous private demonstrations, like those performed by Northrop Grumman’s maintenance satellites or Astroscale’s orbital garbage hunting missions, operate on slower time frames.

And now things get interesting: The two companies are prepared to perform new exercises in the weeks ahead with increasing difficulty, which could include Rocket Lab’s Puma trying to evade True Anomaly’s Jackal and performing its own inspection maneuvers.

Founded in 2022 by Rogers and a cadre of former military space experts, True Anomaly’s plan has to been to build both the hardware and software to enable the new tasks assigned to the US Space Force when it was created in 2019. After several years of development missions, last month’s demonstration has begun to realize that vision.

“That’s the secret sauce of this company,” said Seth Winterroth, a partner at Eclipse Ventures who sits on True Anomaly’s board. “It’s not one spacecraft architecture or one piece of software or a certain set of payloads — it’s a deep, deep understanding of what tactics and doctrine look like in this domain.”

True Anomaly has raised just over $1 billion, including a $650 million round in March. Now, the company will look to compete for a number of task orders, particularly in the Space Force’s $6.2 billion Andromeda program, which looks to the private sector for exactly this kind of maneuverable reconnaissance.

“Flight heritage is everything, and demonstrated capability is what speaks the loudest with these opportunities,” Rogers said.

Nvidia competitor Etched announced this week that TSMC had manufactured its first chip earlier this year. While the four-year-old startup valued at $5 billion is getting ready to ship systems powered by that chip to customers later this summer, scaling production may prove challenging. Like other chip designers, Etched must compete for limited capacity at TSMC’s Taiwan factories.

Copper Sky Capital, one of Etched early investors, is hopeful that the chip maker will find a solution to its manufacturing constraints by eventually producing chips at Arizona’s TSMC facility. When the four-year-old VC firm invested in Etched’s $120 million Series A two years ago, founder Jack Selby secured an allocation in part by promising to help the startup eventually reshore its chip fabrication to Arizona.

Selby, a former PayPal exec and longtime managing director to Peter Thiel’s family office, Thiel Capital, founded Phoenix-based Copper Sky in 2021 (formerly known as AZ-VC). The firm’s first $115 million fund focused primarily on startups based in Arizona and the Southwest. Selby’s thesis was that most coastal startups, particularly those based in California, Massachusetts, and New York, are grossly overpriced compared to companies popping up in his region. However, Selby saw an opportunity to bridge the gap in the other direction by helping California-based hardware startups move their production to Arizona.

Selby credits Copper Sky’s investment in Etched — an otherwise hard-to-access startup — to his influential role in Arizona’s economy. As a board member of the Arizona Commerce Authority, Selby is deeply involved in recruiting out-of-state businesses to set up manufacturing operations in the region.

“When Copper Sky invested with Etched, the company clearly understood our connectivity to the Arizona semiconductor industry, and in particular the local TSMC GIGAFAB,” Selby told TechCrunch.

While Copper Sky has recently expanded its focus beyond the Southwest to include non-traditional venture hubs nationwide, Selby said that the firm is also interested in backing hardware companies, including in the defense sector, that can set up manufacturing operations in Arizona. 

The firm is expected to soon have more capital to invest in those higher-priced coastal companies, and those throughout the United States. Copper Sky is currently raising a $300 million second fund, according to a regulatory filing.

IQM, a full-stack quantum company out of Finland, went public on the Nasdaq Thursday via a SPAC merger at a valuation of about $1.9 billion. But share prices didn’t pop. They spent most the day below the IPO price — a lukewarm welcome.

SPAC mergers are often not immediately popular with retail investors these days. But this fizzle was arguably fueled by IQM’s own admission in its prospectus that “large-scale commercial traction of quantum computing technology may never occur.”

In fairness, this warning applies to all quantum companies. Yet, that hasn’t stopped the industry, including IQM, from acquiring customers, who use the tech as it is today for tasks like simulations and optimizations. IQM, which sells actual physical computers, as well as a cloud service, has customers like VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Germany.

“We sell computers into advanced supercomputing centers and data centers, and we sell computing time through the cloud,” its CEO and cofounder Jan Goetz told TechCrunch.

Having grown from 8 customers in 2024 to 22 in 2025 is a fair motive for celebration in IQM’s circles, especially when two recent customers are from the private sector. But it also suggests that demand won’t scale until the “quantum advantage” — when quantum chips start outperforming classical computers for a larger range of complex and lengthy tasks, unlocking use cases from biotech to fintech, while potentially upending encryption.

But no one, not even a company making quantum computers, can say when that might be.

This hasn’t stopped investors from doubling down on quantum companies public and private, further encouraged by President Trump’s recent executive orders to accelerate the timeline for quantum. In response, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has committed to deploying “the world’s first fault-tolerant, scientifically relevant quantum computer” by 2028.

While this follows similar announcements from France, Germany and the U.K., Trump’s orders carry extra weight for IQM, which has recently established a quantum tech center in Maryland and deployed a computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is part of the DOE. “We can benefit directly from it,” Goetz said.

Unlike other European unicorns, however, IQM isn’t moving its center of gravity to the other side of the Atlantic. In parallel to its IQMX ticker in the U.S., where most of its quantum peers are listed, it is due to debut tomorrow on Nasdaq Helsinki, where it expects continued support from the likes of Tesi, Finland’s sovereign wealth fund.

IQM’s story is indissociable from Finland. It was founded there in 2018 as a spinout from Aalto University in Espoo, a tech and quantum hub near Helsinki where two thirds of its staff still work. But another hundred out of its 420-people team are based in Munich, with the remainder split around various locations to help the company in its global deployment roadmap.

In its prospectus, IQM noted that this duality appealed to RAAQ, the blank check company that helped IQM go public via a SPAC. “As evidenced by over €200 million in public support for IQM, European sovereign states and companies have supported IQM’s emergence as a prominent quantum computing company in Europe. IQM also demonstrated its ability to operate outside of Europe,” according to the RAAQ board.

Despite global ambitions, Goetz expressed pride at IQM becoming the first European quantum company to list in the U.S. — within a hair’s breadth, as French competitor Pasqal also announced plans to go public via a SPAC. “It always feels good to be first and to be a pioneer, but ultimately it’s about long-term success,” Goetz said.

The operation will generate new liquidity for IQM — approximately €198 million after costs, or $226 million. But the company had already raised $300 million last September. “It’s a big success raising very shortly after the Series B,” Goetz said. This also reflects that IQM’s main goal was to position itself more prominently in a race still full of unknowns.