Virginia-based startup Aventra has raised $17.5 million in new funding, with Konvoy Ventures leading the round. Seed round backer Lavrock Ventures participated alongside new investors Booz Allen Ventures, Sands Capital, Langford Industries, and Western Alliance Bank. The company manufactures Piranha, a high-altitude balloon-dropped glide bomb that converts unguided munitions into precision-guided weapons. Since emerging from stealth with a $3.5 million seed round last October, Aventra has delivered over 400 units to US and NATO customers and doubled its production revenue. The system launches munitions from 60,000 feet and can glide approximately 100 miles, with recent demonstrations achieving accuracy within three metres of targets. Aventra plans to use the funding to scale production from 35 units monthly to 500 through a new Virginia facility called Factory Zero.

Palantir Technologies, Nvidia, and Booz Allen Hamilton are restricting use of AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI over data protection concerns, Reuters reported. The companies worry model providers could retain or extract value from sensitive corporate information. Palantir has pressed Anthropic for zero data retention guarantees. Nvidia limits Anthropic's models to less sensitive tasks, favouring its own Nemotron models for proprietary work. Booz Allen has banned staff from using Anthropic's commercial model on cybersecurity projects involving proprietary data. The pushback intensified after Anthropic introduced a 30-day data retention policy in June for its Claude 3.5 model, citing security monitoring needs. Anthropic responded by launching Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, allowing customers to store activity data in their own cloud infrastructure under their encryption keys.