From Battlefield to Bell

Inflation and bond market jitters wreck the week. This week’s early headlines were driven by the NACHO trade (Not a Chance Hormuz Opens) and accompanying inflation prints (Wall Street Journal). The longer the strait stays closed, the longer global supply chains will be disrupted, driving up prices for energy, metals, agricultural commodities, fertilizer and certain consumer goods. Tuesday’s CPI print came in higher than expected, and Wednesday’s PPI was up 6% yoy, the largest increase since 2022 (TradingView, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal). Markets shrugged off these concerns midweek due to continued bullishness around tech and AI, with both the S&P and Nasdaq reaching all-time highs at Thursday’s close. However, inflation and bond market jitters came roaring back on Friday, pushing the market down closer to a flat performance on the week. Our NPM Private Market Tracker*, which shows the average price performance of the 50 largest names in our internal Nasdaq Price® data, is up ~21% YTD versus the S&P 500/Nasdaq up ~8%/~13%. (Bloomberg; NPM)

We’ve written about the focus on defense tech companies this year in private markets given global geopolitical events. Enthusiasm around the sector has spurred several defense tech companies, as well as a space company focused on defense and intelligence, to go public. This week we look at 2026 space/defense IPOs and compare them to the performance of last year’s crop and the private defense tech universe.

There have been five defense tech IPOs this year: Two of them are space-related (Hawkeye360 and York), two are drone-related (Aevex and Swarmer), and one of them (Arxis) is a dual-use manufacturing company. Arxis stands out because it is a larger, more established company than the others, with positive adjusted EBITDA margins of ~36% and 2025 revenues of ~$1.6 billion (Company SEC filings). Swarmer stands out as a microcap, having raised only ~$17 million of proceeds and with a market cap of ~$330 million. Only Hawkeye, Aevex and Arxis have generated positive adjusted EBITDA.

Hawkeye360 (May IPO, ~$416 million gross proceeds). Hawkeye provides space-enabled, end-to-end radio frequency signals intelligence to the US government and its allies. It had $285 million of funded backlog at 3/31/26 (Company SEC filings).

Aevex Corporation (April IPO, $320 million gross proceeds). AEVEX designs and manufactures autonomous, AI-enabled drones and surface vehicles for the US and its allies. It had $503 million of backlog at 12/31/25 (Company SEC filings).

York Space (January IPO, $629 million gross proceeds). York designs, manufactures and operates satellites, primarily for the US SDA (Space Development Agency) for use in the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA), which is a large constellation of LEO satellites for missile tracking and tactical data relay. While the company’s products are dual use, its primary customers are defense- and intelligence-related at the moment. It had $543 million of backlog at 12/31/25 (Company SEC Filings).

Arxis (April IPO, ~$1.3 billion gross proceeds). Arxis is another “dual use” company with significant defense exposure and is by far the largest of the IPO group. It manufactures electronic and mechanical components for the aerospace and defense industries, with a little less than 50% of its revenues coming from defense/space (Company SEC Filings).

Swarmer (March IPO, ~$17 million gross proceeds). On the other end of the spectrum, Swarmer is a micro-cap defense tech company. It develops vendor-agnostic, autonomous software for deploying and coordinating large-scale drone swarms across air, ground and maritime domains. Swarmer was founded in Ukraine in 2023 and is now headquartered in the US (Company SEC filings).

Swarmer is up significantly from its IPO price, possibly related to a structural supply squeeze given how small the float is and how strong demand is for defense tech now (TradingView, Yahoo Finance). York Space is down ~20%, possible because the company gave 2026 guidance that was below consensus after its first quarter of being public; it also has high customer concentration (the SDA) and doesn’t generate EBITDA (TradingView, Bloomberg, Company SEC filings). The others have traded up from their IPO prices, though we note that their track records aren’t very long. Importantly, they are still within the 180 day window before their IPO lockups expire, and those expirations could drive some trading volatility.

2026 Defense Tech IPOs — share price performance since IPO.

2025 space/defense IPOs have had a more mixed performance. Karman Holdings is up 206% from its February 2025 IPO, while Voyager and Firefly Aerospace are near or below issue price. So, while this year’s IPOs are relatively new, they have clustered in a way last year’s cohort didn’t. (Bloomberg).

2025 Defense Tech IPO share price performance.

YTD defense tech performance in the private markets shows a similar positive trend to the IPOs. Shares in Shield AI (an autonomous drone company) and Saronic (an autonomous surface vessel company) are up 60% and 50% YTD, respectively. Hadrian, which is a precision parts manufacturer for the defense industry, is another top performer. We note that our data does not yet include the round that Anduril priced this week at $61 billion (exactly double its previous valuation of $30.5 billion), and its share price will likely reflect this going forward.

Defense Tech Share Price Performance YTD 2026, indexed to 100 at 12/31/2025.

Based on our proprietary Tape D® data, the best performers of the large cap names in the private market thus far in 2026 have been:

Based on our proprietary Nasdaq Price® data using weighted averages for each sector, the top performing sectors YTD are AI and Machine Learning (32%), Consumer (+32%) and Healthcare (+27%). Strong gains for Cerebras and Anthropic drove AI and Machine Learning to be a top performer.

1. 01
   The House Oversight Committee has opened an investigation into OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s personal investments and their ties to OpenAI’s commercial partnerships. The Information · 5/13
2. 02
   Robinhood is preparing to launch a second retail venture fund that will invest in growth-stage and early-stage startups. StrictlyVC · 5/12
3. 03
   OpenAI announced a $10 billion private equity venture called OpenAI Deployment Company that will help businesses deploy and integrate AI into their operations (The Information, 5/12). This comes after Anthropic’s announcement last week of a JV with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and Hellman & Friedman to help portfolio companies deploy AI in their operations (Wall Street Journal, 5/4). Google is also in talks with Blackstone, KKR and EQT to get their portfolio companies to access Google’s AI models, after signing a deal with Vista Equity Partners to speed up their customers’ AI adoption. The Information · 5/13
4. 04
   Anthropic signed a $1.8 billion, 7-year cloud deal with Akamai (The Information, 5/11). This comes after its deal to source compute capacity from SpaceX. The Information · 5/10
5. 05
   Intel and Apple announced a preliminary agreement for Intel to manufacture chips for Apple. Wall Street Journal · 5/8
6. 06
   Stablecoin issuer Circle said it raised $222 million for Arc, a stablecoin-focused blockchain, at a $3 billion valuation from investors including a16z crypto, Apollo and Blackrock. The Information · 5/12