Insights

June 10, 2026: A Crowell & Moring team represented Arkaea Media Group, a B2B media company covering the defense, space, and nuclear energy sectors, in its acquisition of Decoding Bio, a research and events company focused on the intersection of AI and biotechnology. Decoding Bio publishes a research newsletter with more than 10,000 subscribers and hosts the annual AI x Bio Summit.

San Francisco – December 2, 2025: Crowell & Moring represented Antares, an advanced nuclear energy startup building a small modular nuclear reactor, in connection with its $96 million Series B funding round.

November 24, 2025: Crowell & Moring LLP represented Aptible, a leading provider of secure cloud infrastructure solutions for developers and engineering teams, in connection with its strategic combination with Opti9, a leading cloud solutions provider. This partnership marks a significant milestone for Aptible, enabling it to leverage Opti9’s scale and resources to accelerate innovation and expand its roadmap of cloud offerings. Through this combination, Aptible’s customer base will continue to benefit from the company’s reliable platform and service while gaining access to an even broader suite of managed cloud solutions tailored for modern engineering needs. The combination unlocks new opportunities for Aptible to invest in advanced features, including secure managed AI workloads, universal cloud infrastructure management, and proactive recommendations improving reliability, security, and cost efficiency for its customers.

On July 4, 2025, President Trump signed into law the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (the “Act”), after it was passed by Congress on July 3, 2025. Notably, the Act made significant and welcome changes from the perspective of startup company stockholders and venture capital investors to the qualified small business stock (“QSBS”) rules set forth in Internal Revenue Code (“Code”) Section 1202. In a nutshell, the changes modernize (by adjusting for inflation) and expand the already favorable tax treatment for QSBS under Code Section 1202. The Act also permanently reinstates elective expensing for qualifying domestic research and experimental expenditures that will likely help more startups in research and capital intensive sectors qualify for favorable QSBS treatment.

On June 23, 2023, a coalition of companies, including venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins, General Catalyst and Founders Fund, and start-up defense technology companies, published an open letter to the Department of Defense (DoD), addressed to Secretary Lloyd J. Austin, petitioning DoD to consider procurement reform to help “overcome barriers to innovation.”  The group asserts these barriers create “antiquated methods for developing requirements and selecting technologies that have drastically limited” DoD’s access to “the best commercial innovation.”  In particular, the coalition endorsed adopting four recommendations pulled from a report by The Atlantic Council, a non-partisan international affairs think tank.

On December 1, 2022, Department of Defense (DoD) Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III announced the establishment of the DoD Office of Strategic Capital (OSC).  The mission statement of the OSC is to build an “enduring technical advantage” for the United States by helping partner contractors with private investment to develop national security critical technologies, including those related to advanced materials, next-generation biotechnology, and quantum science.  OSC will coordinate with existing organizations such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), which promotes acceleration of the military use of commercial technologies.