TheChek News Flow

Austin-based defense startup Saronic has raised a $600 million Series C to build an autonomous ship factory called “Port Alpha,” it announced yesterday, quadrupling its valuation to $4 billion from its last round.

Investor Elad Gil led the round, with General Catalyst joining existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, 8VC, and Caffeinated Capital, among others.

That should make Saronic the second, possibly third, most valuable defense tech startup in the U.S. after Anduril’s last round valued it at $14 billion. Shield AI could beat that, though, as it is reportedly in talks to hit a $5 billion valuation on a new round of funding. (Anduril is in talks to raise again at double its valuation, to $28 billion.)

Saronic isn’t the only defense tech darling with big manufacturing ambitions: Anduril, for example, announced plans to build a billion-dollar megafactory in Ohio last month.

Saronic hasn’t found a site for Port Alpha yet but is actively searching, a spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch. Operations at the port, which Saronic is calling the “shipyard of the future,” are slated to begin within five years, Saronic’s co-founder and CEO Dino Mavrookas told Defense News.

Saronic has already developed three models of autonomous surface vessels (ASVs) that are up to 24 feet long — about half as long as a modern lifeboat. But Saronic says the factory will also build large unmanned ships, while bolstering U.S. shipbuilding capacity compared to China.

Unmanned ships are a hot trend in naval warfare, in part thanks to Ukraine’s successful use of drone ships to drive the Russian Navy out of Crimea, despite Ukraine having effectively no manned navy of its own.

Saronic has now raised almost $850 million, Mavrookas said on CNBC, attributing the quadrupled valuation to Saronic’s speed at developing new vessels and software.

Saronic’s raise is the latest sign that defense tech continues to hit new highs in Silicon Valley, buoyed by similar monster rounds.

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Comment came after Zelensky said Trump was repeating Russia disinformation

The feud between President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky escalated rapidly on Wednesday, with Trump calling him a “Dictator without Elections” and Zelensky accusing Trump of repeating Russian propaganda.

The back-and-forth barbs marked a significant deterioration in relations that could complicate efforts to end the war in Ukraine. The exchange came one day after Trump accused Zelensky of starting the war, which began after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a large-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago.

Zelensky told reporters in Ukraine earlier Wednesday that Trump is “living in this disinformation space.” He added, “I want there to be more truth in Trump’s team.”

Trump responded with several accusations, saying Zelensky had misused U.S. aid and “done a terrible job” as president.

“He refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden ‘like a fiddle,’” Trump wrote in a social-media post on Wednesday. “A Dictator without Elections, Zelensky better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left.”

At a Miami investor’s conference later on Wednesday, Trump repeated his criticisms of Zelensky. “I love Ukraine, but Zelensky has done a terrible job,” Trump said. “His country is shattered.”

Trump’s comments echoed Putin’s calls for Ukraine to hold elections, something that is barred under Ukrainian law during wartime. Putin has called Zelensky illegitimate, as his term expired in 2024.

Zelensky had pushed back Wednesday on Trump’s claims that the U.S. had given Ukraine around $350 billion in support. The Ukrainian president, while repeatedly stressing Ukraine’s gratitude, said the U.S. had given $67 billion in military aid and $31.5 billion in support for Ukraine’s budget. Zelensky also said Trump misrepresented his polling numbers, which show his approval rating is above 50%.

Zelensky’s defiant comments—his sharpest yet in response to Trump’s criticisms of his leadership and courting of Putin—highlighted a widening gap between Ukraine and the U.S., the country that has been Kyiv’s most important backer.

Trump has said he wants to quickly settle the war in Ukraine. He has increasingly blamed Ukraine—and Zelensky personally—for the invasion while engaging with Putin about ways to end it. On Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance, in an interview with DailyMail.com, warned Zelensky against “bad mouthing” Trump in public.

Zelensky’s tone reflected a darkening mood toward the Trump administration in Ukraine, which has for three years fought off Russian expansionism at the cost of tens of thousands of troops and civilians killed, and dozens of cities destroyed.

Ukrainian Army Sgt. Oleksandr Solonko, a soldier in a drone unit fighting near the embattled eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, said Trump’s comments this week showed “a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the war, its real causes and the mentality of the Ukrainian people.”

Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) said some of Trump’s comments about Ukraine “sounded straight from a Russian propaganda playbook.” Schumer said it “is disgusting to see an American president turn against one of our friends and openly side with a thug like Vladimir Putin.”

Trump’s position drew praise from Russia on Wednesday. Putin said talks had been “friendly” and covered a range of topics from Ukraine to restoring diplomatic ties as well as the Middle East. “From the American side it was completely different people who were open for the negotiating process without any prejudice,” Putin told reporters.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Trump “is the first, and so far only Western leader to publicly and loudly say that one of the root causes of the Ukraine situation is the impudent line of the previous administration to draw Ukraine into NATO.”

“It’s a signal that he understands our position,” Lavrov told the Russian parliament.

Trump’s Ukraine envoy, retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, arrived Wednesday in Ukraine for his first official visit. At the train station in Kyiv, he said he looked forward to “good, substantial talks.” His mission was to listen, then talk to Trump to “ensure we get this thing right,” he said.

Senior U.S. and Russian officials met Tuesday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and agreed to appoint teams to negotiate a settlement to the war, marking an end to three years of U.S. policy that focused on isolating Moscow and supporting Kyiv for as long as it was willing to keep fighting.

Zelensky has expressed frustration about not being included in talks and said Kyiv wouldn’t recognize agreements reached without his country’s involvement. He said he hoped European countries would continue supporting Ukraine if the U.S. didn’t. “Our strength is that this deal is impossible without us,” he said Wednesday.

Trump indicated Zelensky should hold elections if he wanted a seat at the table, claiming the Ukrainian president’s approval rating had fallen to 4%. He also criticized Zelensky for wanting to take part in talks, saying: “You should’ve ended it in three years. You should have never started it.”

Zelensky hit back Wednesday noting a fresh poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology that put his approval rating at 57% in February, a rise of 5 percentage points from December.

“We saw this disinformation,” Zelensky said. “We understand that it is coming from Russia. We understand this and have proof that these figures are being discussed between America and Russia.”

Zelensky criticized a U.S. proposal presented to him last week that would have seen Ukraine hand over hundreds of billions of dollars in future revenue from natural-resource extraction, with no security guarantees offered in return. “That’s not a serious conversation,” he said. “I can’t sell our state.”

He said, however, that he was prepared to continue discussing the proposal.

Soldiers and civilians expressed anger Wednesday over Trump’s comments and attempts to seal a peace deal with Putin. On social media, Ukrainians posted images of corpses and mass graves discovered in parts of Ukraine after they were retaken from Russian control, with the words: “Russian occupation is not peace, it is a death camp.”

“Russia doesn’t want to negotiate with Ukraine, it wants to destroy it,” said Ukrainian Army Maj. Arislav Pasternak. “So negotiations with them are impossible unless victory on the battlefield becomes impossible for them.”

Lt. Dmytro Ianok urged Americans not to abandon Ukraine, recalling support he had felt on visits to the U.S. “Right now, we need you,” he said.

Ianok, an artillery officer, said Ukrainians were peaceful and were fighting only to defend against an invader. “When authoritarian terror faces no resistance, it doesn’t stop—it spreads, like mold. Let it consume Ukraine, and the entire free world will suffocate in distrust and drown in fear,” he said.

Ukraine’s military-intelligence chief, Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, summed up the mood in a laconic post on his social-media channels: “We will endure.”

As Trump chided Ukraine, 167 Russian attack drones arrowed into Ukrainian skies overnight. Some of them struck power infrastructure in the southern port city of Odesa, leaving more than 160,000 people, as well as schools, kindergartens and hospitals, without heat or electricity as temperatures dipped well below freezing, Zelensky said.

Zelensky said the attack proved that Russia can’t be trusted. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said Tuesday in Riyadh that Russia didn’t attack Ukrainian energy infrastructure. Russia has repeatedly targeted Ukraine’s power stations and electricity grid with missiles and explosive drones, and knocked out heat for 100,000 people in the southern city of Mykolaiv last week.

Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics and a former economy minister under Zelensky, said the Ukrainian leader was doing the right thing by pushing back on Trump with facts and noting Russian disinformation while not criticizing the U.S. president personally.

“It’s a tough balancing act,” Mylovanov wrote on Twitter.

Trump’s Attack on Zelensky Signals New World Order Taking Shape

From alienating allies to praising adversaries, Trump appears set to abandon decades of American foreign policy

President Trump has dramatically shifted the direction of U.S. foreign policy in four short weeks, making the U.S. a less reliable ally and retreating from global commitments in ways that stand to fundamentally reshape America’s relationship with the world.

His top envoys have floated concessions to Russia in peace talks that stunned European allies, followed by Trump calling Ukraine’s leader a dictator, and he kept Europeans at arms length as the negotiations began. He has dismantled the leading U.S. aid agency providing assistance to the developing world where China aims to establish a foothold. Trump’s plan to own Gaza and remove Palestinians from the enclave erased decades of Washington’s efforts to broker a two-state solution. And his plans to increase tariffs heralded an end to American-fueled globalization.

No one expected Trump to handle global affairs like his predecessors. But few expected him to move so rapidly to reorient U.S. foreign policy away from the course it has charted since 1945.

Since the end of World War II, the American-led system of alliances has bolstered U.S. power, most foreign policy experts say. By vowing to defend allies in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, the U.S. more than any other country took on the role of global guarantor of free trade and stability, a mission that included countering first the Soviet Union and, more recently, China.

Trump has a different take: Allies take more than they give. Instead of relying on the U.S. military and its nuclear umbrella for their security, other countries should spend more on their militaries while providing economic incentives to stay in America’s good graces. Trump’s is a far more transactional, win-lose vision of foreign policy.

“It’s not that President Trump is abandoning the post-World War II order,” said Victoria Coates, vice president for national security and foreign policy at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “It’s that we are no longer in the post-World War II era and we have to accept that the geopolitical landscape has shifted.”

The same approach drove Trump’s first-term foreign policy but in his second term he has injected a new element, proposing to expand U.S. borders and take territory overseas unilaterally.

Even before returning to the White House, Trump mused about reclaiming the Panama Canal, seizing Greenland from Denmark and making Canada the 51st state. When he repeated the notions after taking office, it turned what had been far-fetched ideas into possible U.S. policy and a signal of intentions to countries worldwide.

“It will be very difficult to undo what is being done in foreign policy or to persuade allies this was a never-to-be repeated one off. This was possible after Trump’s election but not his re-election,” said Richard Haass, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and former senior official in Republican administrations. “America’s reputation for reliability and predictability has been seriously compromised.”

Recent events have only deepened allied suspicions about a Trump-led America.

Last week, Trump agreed to negotiations that could end Moscow’s global isolation following a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth later said peace talks to end the war in Ukraine wouldn’t see the country join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—a win for Moscow even before diplomacy began. Hegseth walked the comments back, insisting that all options remained on the table, but allies immediately sensed the U.S. under Trump cared little about trans-Atlantic unity.

During a speech Friday at the Munich Security Conference, Vice President JD Vance called out European allies for what he said was a subversion of democracy—without discussing how to end the large conflict to the east. European governments asked for a seat at the Ukraine-Russia table, only to have U.S. officials say they couldn’t attend the talks but would have their views taken into consideration.

“What’s happening is a serious challenge to the foundation of the post-World War II world order,” said Chuck Hagel, the former Republican senator turned defense secretary in the Obama administration. “I’ve never felt so concerned about the future of this country and this world as I am now.”

The yawning trans-Atlantic gap widened further this week. On Tuesday, after negotiations in Saudi Arabia between U.S. and Russian officials ended, Trump blamed Kyiv for starting the war, though it was Russian forces that poured across the border three years ago, when Putin ordered the full-scale invasion. Trump’s remarks prompted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to say the U.S. president was parroting Kremlin disinformation.

Trump responded Wednesday with the harshest tirade against Ukraine by any U.S. official since the war began, calling Zelensky a “Dictator without Elections” on social media. Zelensky’s term expired last year, but elections were postponed as Ukrainian legislation prohibits holding them while the country is under martial law.

The tilt toward Russia and away from Ukraine has rewarded Moscow for appealing to Trump, said Ivo Daalder, the U.S. ambassador to NATO during the Obama administration.

“He has adopted Putin’s talking points,” Daalder said. “Putin is now in the excellent position of having only to say ‘Da,’ knowing that if Ukraine says ‘Nyet,’ Trump will blame Kyiv.”

That, of course, isn’t how the Trump administration sees it. “President Trump’s leadership has created the first opening for talks in years, and he did this after only four weeks in office,” said National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes. “He is leaving no stone unturned as it relates to finding a peaceful resolution in Ukraine—something the previous administration abysmally flunked.”

Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, said it was high time an American leader acted in a way that persuaded Europeans to care more for their own region. “Trump is fulfilling an American vision that goes back to Dwight Eisenhower, who worried in 1959 that Europe’s lackadaisical attitude toward its own security was turning Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker,” he said.

“There are howls of outrage up and down Massachusetts Avenue think tanks as consensus pieties are being uprooted and burned,” Logan continued. “If Americans are lucky, that outrage will continue.”

But America’s posture abroad had shifted even before the Ukraine dust-up.

The Trump administration in its first weeks dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, freezing billions of dollars in foreign assistance for programs that treat AIDS, track pandemics and provide maternal care. Programs from Latin America to Africa to Asia were paused, eroding years of trust built up by the U.S. government and its partners in developing areas, aid workers say.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who as a U.S. senator spent years praising USAID as a bulwark against China, is now presiding over a vastly reduced assistance program, which Democrats and foreign aid workers say will only benefit U.S. adversaries investing in regions that the U.S. abandoned. China has already told Communist leaders in Nepal that Beijing is ready to fill the funding void in the country left by USAID.

The impact of the withdrawal in Nepal and elsewhere “will affect how people around the world see the United States,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D., N.H.), the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “It leaves a vacuum that is going to be filled by China, by Russia, by our adversaries.”

Meanwhile, Trump administration officials say the president’s approach has produced early wins. The talk of controlling the Panama Canal led Panama’s president to abandon China’s Belt and Road Initiative, minimizing Beijing’s influence in the Western Hemisphere. And despite proposing to dislodge Palestinians from Gaza while the U.S. rebuilds the seaside strip, Trump has continued to hold what administration officials describe as productive meetings with Middle Eastern leaders including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and King Abdullah II of Jordan.

Not all of Trump’s critics say that the president is irrevocably changing U.S. foreign policy.

John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser who turned against his former boss, said the president doesn’t have a coherent enough ideology to dismantle the global order.

“This is one man’s view, but unfortunately he’s the president,” Bolton said. His advice to allies: “Just grit your teeth.”

Proposed new standards could reshape sharia-compliant bonds and hit growth of $1tn market

The issuance of Islamic bonds could seize up over a new and controversial set of proposals from religious clerics, say credit rating agencies, which warn that the fast-growing $1tn market could fragment as a result of the plans.

Saudi Arabia and other Muslim-majority states are awaiting the outcome of a consultation by the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI), the industry’s main standards-setting body, on its plans for issuers of Islamic bonds to transfer the legal ownership of assets that underpin them to investors.

AAOIFI says the move is required to harmonise issuance across several jurisdictions and ensure they more closely adhere to Islamic principles of risk-sharing in contracts. The body said in hearings this month that it would bring in the measures, known as Standard 62, this year, although issuers are expected to be given between one and three years to implement them.

Analysts have warned that the proposals represent a seismic change that would add huge legal complexity and raise transaction costs for Islamic bonds, known as sukuk. They say this could put off investors and stymie issuance, and lead to different countries following different standards.

“There will be an immediate impact,” said Reza Baqir, former governor of Pakistan’s central bank and a managing director of sovereign advisory services at Alvarez & Marsal. “There’s a risk it will stratify the market and delay the [wider] adoption of sukuk.”

Sukuk provide a means of working around the Muslim prohibition on partaking in transactions involving interest, by putting a borrower’s asset into an independent trust that then pays investors a pre-determined income rather than a fixed coupon.

The market for these bond-like instruments has grown rapidly, with issuance forecast to reach $200bn this year, according to S&P Global. Foreign currency issuance has climbed 24 per cent over the past year, as borrowers start to tap investors in the US and Europe.

However, AAOIFI’s scholars have been concerned that the market in its current form does not adhere to the spirit of Islamic financial jurisprudence. Many clerics want to see something more akin to an equity investment, where ownership of the underlying asset is transferred for the length of the contract.

Islamic law is open to interpretation and there is no single agreed-upon set of rules, with AAOIFI providing guidance based on the consensus view of 21 senior scholars in Islamic law and finance.

In 2008, in a seminal moment for the industry, AAOIFI’s chair Sheikh Muhammad Taqi Usmani said 85 per cent of the market breached key principles of Islamic law by not adequately sharing risk between obligor and lender. This triggered a transition to more asset-backed securities.

Rating agencies S&P Global and Moody’s say bond investors would be put off, either temporarily or permanently, because of AAOIFI’s proposal, as the new structures would no longer mimic a conventional bond. The latter has also said the move could “significantly” dampen sukuk issuance in 2025 if adopted in its proposed form. Fitch has said further moves towards a quasi-equity structure could render the instruments unrateable.

”If sukuk ceases to be a fixed income instrument, you will lose investors,” said Mohamed Damak, global head of Islamic finance at S&P Global.

Analysts have also said that rules blocking foreigners from owning land and property in some Middle East states could make it difficult for sovereigns to transfer ownership as part of any debt issuance, even on a temporary basis.

Saudi Arabia is now the biggest issuer of sukuk, having sought foreign investment to help finance crown prince Mohammed bin Salman’s ambitious Vision 2030 plans to modernise the kingdom. Islamic bonds make up around 60 per cent of its total debt issuance, according to data provider Dealogic.

Multiple lawyers involved in structuring Islamic sukuk contracts said they expect Saudi regulators to apply rules based on a looser interpretation of Islamic law, rather than comply with AAOIFI’s strict interpretation, splintering the market.

“If you interpret the rules in the most rigid and black and white way, it will be an own goal, because it will shrink the market,” said Debashis Dey, a partner at law firm White & Case.

Dey added that Standard 62 could lead to the creation of a range of structures, including a covered bond-like instrument — ultra-safe debt that give investors recourse both to the issuing bank and an underlying pool of assets — at one extreme and an equity-like instrument at the other.

Despite AAOIFI’s Standard 62 being laid out as guidance, religious scholars have grown wary of the various routes practitioners adopt to bypass intended changes.

“Sukuk do not look very different to conventional bonds any more and the market [needs] to move back to its roots, which is in trade not debt,” said Harris Irfan, former head of Islamic finance at Deutsche Bank and founder of Cordoba Capital.

“There will be a painful transition period. Some sovereigns might say that ‘we’re not playing this new game’ . . .[but] there’s no reason why institutional investors can’t participate,” Irfan added.