Exclusive: Defense tech startup Onebrief hits $1.1B valuation
Why it matters: The valuation almost doubles the company's $650 million valuation in a February deal led by General Catalyst.
How it works: Onebrief's collaborative workflow platform helps military staff from different organizations stay up to date in real-time planning, while its AI features help with decision making.
There also could be an opportunity to sell the platform to other parts of the federal government, such as FEMA and Homeland Security, says Michael Brown, general partner at Battery Ventures.
Catch up quick: Defense tech funding has been on a roll, as best illustrated by Anduril's $2.5 billion raise led by Founders Fund at a $30.5 billion valuation earlier this month.
What they're saying:"I think there's an understanding right now that we have to be on our front foot when it comes to defense," Brown says, speaking on current investor interest in defense tech.
The bottom line: Demaree said it would be possible for the Honolulu-based company to raise again before the end of the year.
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San Francisco Chronicle
11 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
California finally passed CEQA reform. Will it stop housing roadblocks?
The titanic shift in California housing policy orchestrated by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday night, resulting in the rewriting of large parts of the California Environmental Quality Act, will allow him to spend the final 18 months in office trying to correct one of his biggest policy failures unencumbered by what he views as a key roadblock. Newsom and housing advocates have long blamed the CEQA environmental review process for the state's inability to keep up with growing housing demand. But with the legislation passed Monday those reviews have been severely curtailed. As pro-housing advocates celebrated one of their biggest victories in years and environmentalists decried the potential damage from the new laws, one question went largely unasked: Will they work? While CEQA lawsuits from environmental groups and neighbors across California — often a single neighbor — have protected open space, thwarted polluters and spared pristine coastlines from luxury resorts, Newsom and housing advocates believe they have also been weaponized to bog down and kill badly needed housing, and in doing so, have helped make housing more expensive and less accessible. But plenty of obstacles to home-building remain — including construction costs and interest rates — meaning it's unclear just how big of an impact the CEQA reforms will have and how quickly Californians will feel them. Proponents of the legislation saw some quick victories. After a five-year period in which the slow pandemic recovery and high costs clogged the pipeline of new projects, a much improved regulatory landscape awaits builders as soon as conditions improve. 'It will absolutely speed up project approvals in infill locations with no or low litigation risk under CEQA,' said land use attorney Jennifer Hernandez. 'And it will make the application cheaper for sure.' Labor unions will no longer be able to use CEQA lawsuits to extract better wages and other concessions from developers on individual projects, sometimes without any clear benefit to the environment, according to Oakland-based real estate attorney Robert Selna. 'The unions have gone astray in this regard — they use environmental law as leverage to extort contracts for their members, which has been a significant impediment to building housing,' Selna said. He pointed to a former client's project in San Lorenzo, which faced heavy opposition from organized labor after its developer declined to commit to exclusively using union labor. The project was never built. 'This is the first time I have seen a CEQA reform really have a chance to make a difference,' Selna said. Union representatives contacted by the Chronicle were reluctant to speak on the record. But the general sentiment was that not all were neutral about the provisions of the reform. In San Francisco the laws won't make a huge impact because the majority of infill housing developments already take advantage of state programs that exempt them from CEQA review. The problem in the city remains challenging market conditions. Nonetheless, Mark MacDonald of DM Development, one of the city's most prolific buildings over the last 12 years, said that the streamlining bills have been a game-changer, cutting at least a year off the approval process — and sometimes more. 'In San Francisco, best case you are looking at 18 months and worst case you are looking at years, or never,' he said. 'It's certain and it's fast and that is why S.F. has tens of thousands of units entitled. If market conditions were different we would be building a lot of housing now. That time will come.' The new laws were spearheaded by two Bay Area housing reform advocates, Assembly Member Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, and Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco. But by making the state budget contingent on the reforms' passage, Newsom employed all his political clout in what was for him an unusual foray into the legislative process. In a statement after he signed the measures, Newsom called them 'transformative' and 'the most consequential housing and infrastructure reform in recent state history.' Sam Oliker-Friedland, executive director of Institute of Responsive Government, agreed, calling the new laws 'one of the most important housing reforms in a generation.' But environmentalists, who said CEQA is not to blame for California's housing crisis, predicted that relaxing the law will provide a gaping loophole for developers willing to damage the environment in pursuit of a profit. Bradley Angel, of Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, said its reform comes 'under the false guise of promoting affordable housing' and weakens an 'incredibly important' tool for advocates to 'challenge bad decisions that pose a threat to public health.' 'Any weakening of CEQA will make it easier for dirty industries to pollute communities,' he said. Longtime environmental law and land use attorney Stu Flashman agreed. 'They are telling untruths and they are telling them on purpose. The fraud is: if we get rid of CEQA, we get much more affordable housing,' Flashman said. 'It's a minor factor in the cost of housing in California.' Flashman credits the law with preventing a Chiron biotech manufacturing plant from encroaching on a residential neighborhood in Emeryville in the 1980s. 'The city of Emeryville was going to approve it under a negative declaration,' said Flashman, referring to a determination under CEQA that a proposed project will not have a significant negative impact on the environment. Flahsman, who lived two blocks away from the planned project, was part of a lawsuit against the city to thwart the massive development. A settlement between the parties required the city to conduct a full blown environmental impact analysis for the project. The plan ultimately unraveled. Flashman is as certain today as he was then that Emeryville was 'the winner of that fight.' 'There is still biotech going on in the city, but it's not manufacturing. It's much more contained. Part of the area (where the plant was planned) later on became Pixar Studios,' he said. 'Development still happened, jobs still came, but the risks of building a huge biotech plant weren't there, and other (growth) happened instead.' Flashman referred to the present attempt at reforming the law as 'horrifying,' The fact that CEQA legal process is 'complaint based' has long meant that the more urban the location, the more vulnerable a developer is to being challenged in court. That means that the 100-acre subdivision in an exurb often flies through the approval process while the 100-unit apartment building next to a rail station gets bogged down, and often killed, in appeals. 'If you don't have any neighbors, if you are building in a green field, a place that is by definition the least sustainable, then you are going to have an easier time with CEQA than if you build in a place where people already live,' said Sonya Trauss, who founded the YIMBY movement in 2015 and is the executive director of the group YIMBY Law. As the housing crisis has tightened its grip on the state, pressure to make building housing easier has ratcheted up. Still, instead of major reforms, lawmakers over the last few years took a piecemeal approach — carving out so many projects for exemptions that critics have called it 'Swiss cheese CEQA.' But the bills Newsom signed Monday grant broad exemptions to CEQA for homes and other buildings in already developed areas. The list of projects that are now exempt includes mostly categories that would hardly be seen as environmental scofflaws: childcare centers, food banks, farmworker housing, health clinics, advanced manufacturing sites, and infill housing complexes less than 85 feet. And the list of exemptions is not exactly random. From a food bank in Alameda to a plan to add 34 bike lanes in San Francisco to farmworker housing in downtown Half Moon Bay, the list includes types of projects that have been targeted by opponents using CEQA. As he was failing to meet his goals for building new housing, Newsom tried, among other things, forcing cities to rezone for bigger buildings and denser neighborhoods and punishing towns that blocked development. But those steps didn't work, leading to Monday's drastic actions. Trauss attributed CEQA reform passing with such a lopsided vote to the fact that so little housing is being built at the moment. She compared it to the years after the Great Recession when San Francisco lowered affordability requirements with the support of groups normally on the opposite sides of the political spectrum. 'This is a similar moment,' she said. 'People are surprised that politics lined up to facilitate homebuilding without doing all these exactions for labor or affordability. It makes sense. We are not seeing applications, stuff is not being built. When things dry up that much everybody starts to realize what an emergency it is and they are more open to solving the problem.' Trauss said the CEQA reforms 'really zero in on where the action is.' 'It's definitely the new environmentalism,' she said. Melissa Romero, policy advocacy director for California Environmental voters, disagrees, predicting that public health and community safety will suffer under the new laws. 'The quiet but dangerous rollback of California's core health and safety protections paves the way for industrial projects to move forward without proper review and creates a long list of exemptions from endangered species habitat protection,' Romero said.
New York Post
41 minutes ago
- New York Post
Six Flags to close another park, months after announcing closure of Maryland attraction
Six Flags plans to shut down one of its West Coast parks before its lease ends in three years, the latest site of the entertainment group to meet an ultimate demise. Six Flags California's Great America is expected to close its doors for the last time at the end of the 2027 season. The park's fate was revealed after a recent investors' meeting. 3 California Great Adventure in Santa Clara, Calif. Facebook 'Unless we decide to extend, and exercise one of our options to extend that lease, that park's last year without that extension would be after the '27 season,' CFO Brian Witherow said, according to PEOPLE. Witherow described the Santa Clara park and the soon-to-close Six Flags America in Maryland as 'very low on the ranking of margins,' the outlet reported. The nearly 50-year-old amusement park opened as Marriott's Great Adventure in 1976 and has operated under several ownerships, including Paramount and Cedar Fair, the latter merged with Six Flags in 2024. The Santa Clara attraction sat on public land before Cedar Fair purchased the 112-acre estate in 2019. Cedar Fair sold the site to real estate firm Prologis in 2022. 3 Great America has operated under several ownerships including Cedar Fair before the Six Flags merger in 2024. Sundry Photography – The San Francisco-based investment group purchased the land for $310 million with an agreement for the park to remain at the site until the lease ran out at the end of June 2028, with the possibility of a five-year extension, the outlet reported. At the time of the sale, Cedar Fair had announced its intentions to shut down the park at the end of the lease. 'We chose Prologis as our partner because of their deep ties in the Bay Area and their reputation for working closely with local communities on large developments,' the company said in the June 2022 press release. The property sits just north of US 101 in Santa Clara and shares a parking lot with the San Francisco 49ers' Levi's Stadium. Prologis has begun to explore future possibilities for the site, but hasn't made any public announcement. 'We're focused on identifying and partnering with planning and design experts to help us create a master plan for the property, working with the city and community along the way,' the company told the Los Angeles Times in January. Six Flags and Cedar Fair officially merged in July 2024 to create the 'largest' amusement park operator in North America with a combined portfolio of 42 parks across the US, Canada and Mexico. The agreement allowed Six Flags to keep its name, but would be headed by several Cedar Fair executives plus two executives from Six Flags. The newly merged executive board announced in May plans to shut down Six Flags America in Bowie, Maryland at the end of the 2025 season. 3 The property sits just north of US 101 in Santa Clara and shares a parking lot with the San Francisco 49ers' Levi's Stadium. Facebook 'As part of our comprehensive review of our park portfolio, we have determined that Six Flags America and Hurricane Harbor are not a strategic fit with the company's long-term growth plan,' CEO Richard A. Zimmerman said. The 500-acre plot, located 23 miles east of Washington, DC, will be sold as a redevelopment opportunity as part of the company's 'long-term growth plan.'
Business Insider
an hour ago
- Business Insider
Corona's owner says beer sales have slowed because one major customer group isn't buying beer like it used to
Corona's parent company said its sales have fallen, in part because Hispanic customers aren't buying as much beer. New York-based Constellation Brands posted its first quarter earnings on Tuesday, reporting $2.23 billion in beer sales in the quarter — a 2% decline from the year before. The company said its top sales states, particularly "zip codes with larger Hispanic populations," saw subdued spending. Hispanic customers make up about 50% of the company's beer consumer base, Constellation Brands' CEO, Bill Newlands, said in April's earnings call. Newlands and the company's CFO said in a joint commentary on Tuesday that the company had surveyed a group of its customers, both Hispanic and non-Hispanic. The execs wrote that survey results showed "over 80% of the surveyed Hispanic and non-Hispanic consumers expressed concerns about the socioeconomic environment in the U.S." The survey results also showed that customers were reducing their group gatherings, both in public and at home, and avoiding shopping at convenience stores and gas stations. Newlands said in the earlier April earnings call that over half of their Hispanic customers were concerned about immigration changes. Since the start of President Donald Trump's second term in January, he has cracked down on illegal immigration. In his campaign rally last November, he promised to carry out the "largest deportation program" in American history. Business owners in neighborhoods with large immigrant populations previously told BI that they saw lower footfall because customers feared Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. Constellation Brands, which also owns the beer brand Modelo and the wine brand Kim Crawford, saw an overall 6% decline in sales in the latest quarter compared to the year before, with a total revenue of $2.52 billion. The company's wines and spirits category performed worse than its beer category, with a 28% decrease in net sales in the quarter.
