WHAT'S NEXT?! Montana Festival!

Welcome to Montana's startup and emerging tech briefing — from Frontier Angels. Maybe you invest in or advise startups. Maybe you're raising. Maybe you're just "Startup Curious." ;) Either way, this is the best way I know to connect a community that wants the best for Montana. Glad you're here.

— Graham Conran · Frontier Angels | BizBuyAngels | Headwaters Seed Fund I

🎉 Montana Festival kicks off today. Montana's annual gathering of entrepreneurs, investors, creators, and community builders runs June 11–12 at the Emerson in downtown Bozeman — 1,000 attendees, three stages, and 50+ speakers. If you're going, come say hi. See the two-day agenda →

Hey What's Next?! Subscribers —

The headline this month is a manufacturing decision, not a funding round. On June 2, Janicki Industries — one of the largest privately owned Tier 1 aerospace suppliers in the country — selected Great Falls for an $800 million manufacturing campus. Pair that with a longer-term research partnership in Butte and a public-company contract win in Belgrade, and a theme comes into focus: Montana is becoming a real address for aerospace, defense, and hard-tech manufacturing.

$800M Janicki campus, Great Falls  ·  $30M Bridger USFS task orders  ·  $3M Capital One, MT entrepreneurs

Janicki Industries picks Great Falls for an $800M aerospace campus. One of the country's largest private Tier 1 aerospace suppliers is bringing 2 million square feet and 2,000+ jobs to Montana — driven by demand it can't meet anywhere else. Governor's announcement · Montana Free Press

Bridger Aerospace lands its longest-ever Forest Service deployment. The Belgrade firm (NASDAQ: BAER) locked in $30M in guaranteed 2026 revenue to keep four "Super Scoopers" on standby — a record contract heading into fire season. NBC Montana · BusinessWire

Montana Tech plugs Butte into a national nuclear lab. A new partnership with Idaho National Laboratory puts Montana Tech at the center of critical-minerals and nuclear research — the supply-chain and dual-use themes we watch closest. Montana Tech announcement · NBC Montana

$3M in fresh, non-dilutive capital hits the early-stage stack. Capital One is backing Montana founders through MoFi and MSU's LaunchPad — fuel for the exact end of the pipeline where most of our deal flow starts. Full story

Quick hit: The City of Bozeman is now paying for AI — a 3-year deal with Citian to mine crash data for safer streets. KBZK

Seeing deal flow we should know about? Reply to this email.

Defense tech is rewriting the venture record books — and Montana is in the supply chain.

Per Crunchbase, more than $14.6 billion in venture funding has gone into military, national-security, and defense-tech companies so far in 2026 — already past the sector's prior full-year record of $9.6 billion set across all of 2025. Anduril alone raised a $5 billion round last month at a $30.5 billion valuation. Crunchbase

Most of that capital is chasing a handful of large, late-stage names. But the buildout underneath them — composites and advanced manufacturing, critical minerals, autonomy, energy — runs through exactly the kind of regional suppliers Montana is now attracting. Janicki's Great Falls campus, Bridger's federal contracts, and Montana Tech's critical-minerals work are three different points on that same curve. The question we ask on every hard-tech deal: is this a company that benefits from the defense and reshoring tailwind, or one that's merely adjacent to it

HubSpot switched to Mintlify and saw 3x faster builds with 50% fewer eng resources. Beautiful, AI-native documentation that scales with your product — no custom infrastructure required.

Simplify Your Docs Today

Manufacturing is back as an investable category — and it favors places like Montana.

For two decades the default assumption was that the value lived in software and the atoms got outsourced. Reshoring, defense demand, and supply-chain security are bending that back. An $800M composites campus doesn't land in Great Falls because of tax incentives alone — it lands because the talent, land, energy, and logistics math finally works outside the coasts.

For regional angels, that's worth sitting with. The next decade of Montana deal flow may lean less toward another SaaS tool and more toward the companies that supply, service, and spin out of facilities like this one. We're not trying to out-bid Sand Hill Road on the next AI round; we're trying to be early and useful where Montana has a structural edge — and then be there when that edge turns into companies.

What you may have missed on LinkedIn.

Submittable (Missoula). "A Path Through AI Overwhelm" lays out four questions for social-impact leaders weighing AI adoption. Post

Pulsara (Bozeman). The care-coordination company flagged the first AHA/ACC acute pulmonary embolism guidelines and shared how teams are tightening time-sensitive care handoffs. Post

Foundant Technologies (Bozeman). A look at how foundations are putting AI to work in grantmaking. Post

Wisetail (Bozeman). On extending frontline enablement beyond the traditional LMS. Post

Our next Frontier Angels member dinner is June 17 @ Kiln in Bozeman. If you're curious about angel investing, are an accredited investor, and want to see how we operate — reach out directly: [email protected].

And if you've seen deal flow worth sharing — a company, a founder, a sector catching your eye in Montana — reply to this email. The best deal flow in this network comes from our members and readers themselves.

What's Next?! Montana is published by Frontier Angels · Bozeman, MT · Forward freely.