May 2026 Pulse

May 2026 in brief.

Sixteen events and a ≥$9.29B floor, the highest in the 24-month archive, with every amount disclosed. Anduril’s $5B Series H (Thrive, a16z) was the largest single event on the tape and sits under Missiles, Munitions & Missile Defense on its Barracuda, counter-UAS and Golden Dome exposure. Parker Hannifin agreed to buy CIRCOR Aerospace from KKR for $2.55B — flight-critical motion and flow control with a roughly even commercial-defense mix. Space & Launch recorded five events: Astranis’ $300M Series E for small GEO satcom, Aetherflux’s $275M Series B (rebranding as Cowboy Space), Observable Space’s $90M Series A (Lux) for optical and laser communications, Star Catcher’s $65M Series A for in-space power beaming, and Lunar Outpost’s $30M. Amca’s $300M Series B (Caffeinated) for integrated A&D manufacturing and Mach Industries’ $50M purchase of Exquadrum (solid rocket motors) extended the industrial-base theme. Israeli software took two $200M events — Kela’s growth round (Stripes, D1) and Ondas’ acquisition of Omnisys — and HavocAI raised $100M seven months after its $85M growth round.

Strip out Anduril and CIRCOR and May is a $1.74B month with a $78M median — healthy, but it is the two outliers that make the headline. The durable read is Space’s five events and the industrial-base rounds (Amca, Exquadrum): both categories now have $300M-scale private comparables that did not exist a year earlier. For experts, Golden Dome, satcom and solid-rocket-motor production are the three knowledge areas May’s capital is betting on.

Activity vs each domain’s own baseline.

Each cell is the number of publicly announced deals in that domain and month. Color compares the month with that domain’s own average over the months shown — not a scale shared across domains — so a dark cell in a small domain means “busy for that domain”, not “large in dollars”. Domains with fewer than 12 events in the window are shown in gray without color. Absolute totals across all 24 months are on the archive home.

Top deals.

Movers.

We flag a domain only when its last three months differ from the prior three by 30% or more and it has at least 36 events in the trailing 12 months. Smaller samples stay as raw counts on the heat map; we never quote month-over-month percentages.

• Autonomous Systems & Robotics: 9 events in the last three months vs 6 in the prior three (+50%); 2 events this month against a 12-month average of 3.0.

Fund closes, programs and other items.

Fund closes, government capital programs and other supply-side items sit here, outside the deal statistics.

May activity by domain.

A full section (narrative and table) for any domain with five or more events this month; a compact list otherwise. Each event has one primary domain: the market the money is buying.

Deal table, method and definitions.

Issue deal table

Method & coverage

Public sources only · Issue window = first public announcement in May 2026 · 16 announced or closed events (F 13 · M 3 · P 0) · Disclosed floor ≥$9.29B across 16 of 16 (0% undisclosed) · Closings of deals first announced in an earlier month are not counted again here · Capital-supply items are sidebar-only and excluded from domain statistics · Heat-map colors use each domain’s own trailing-12-month baseline.

Event codes & terms

About ASC

Abelian Security Council (ASC) gives clients in defense, national security and critical technologies direct, compliant access to the people who researched, designed, built, evaluated, bought, deployed and competed with the systems they are underwriting. Pulse is the public layer of that work: a curated tape of announced financings, acquisitions and listings, compiled from public sources and published monthly. Clients can schedule a call with Owen Davies, ASC’s Chief Executive. Members can apply to join.