Anduril Industries

Anduril was founded by Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey, with co-founders Brian Schimpf, Matt Grimm, Joe Chen, and Founders Fund partner Trae Stephens. The company was incorporated in June 2017 and was initially based in Irvine, California. Grimm and Stephens were former Palantir engineers, Chen was a former Oculus producer and product lead, and Schimpf, a former Palantir director, was already listed as chief executive officer in June 2017.⁠[1][2][2][2]

The company said at the time that it was privately funding and building products that the United States and its allies urgently needed, including real-time battlefield awareness for soldiers on the ground and headquarters alike and technology to keep front-line personnel out of harm’s way; its job postings covered computer vision, sensor fusion, distributed computing, optics and camera systems, LIDAR and RADAR, robotics, and aeronautical design.⁠[2][2][2]

In July 2020, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) awarded Anduril a $25 million surveillance tower contract, followed by $36 million in September, with plans to deploy 200 AI-powered autonomous surveillance towers by 2022 in a relationship worth more than $200 million in total. The towers, together with Anduril’s small, ultra-quiet Ghost drones, relay data back to the company’s Lattice software platform, which automatically identifies people crossing the border and sends push alerts to border agents; that month the company launched the fourth generation of its Ghost drone, and it had already introduced Anvil, a counter-drone system that can identify a target drone and knock it out of the sky.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3]

In September 2020, Anduril became one of 15 companies awarded U.S. Air Force contracts worth up to $950 million each, related to Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2), the concept of connecting sensors from all of the military services; Luckey said the contracts were part of the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS).⁠[4][4][4]

Anduril acquired Area-I, a Georgia-based air-launched effects company whose main product is the ALTIUS unmanned system, which can be launched from platforms such as helicopters; after the acquisition, it operated as a wholly owned subsidiary under the Area-I brand.⁠[1][1][1][1]

Anduril raised a $450 million Series D round at a $4.6 billion valuation (up from $1.9 billion in July 2020), led by angel investor Elad Gil with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, 8VC, General Catalyst, Lux Capital, and others. By then the company had won contracts with CBP and the U.S. Marine Corps, and its products included long-endurance drones, surveillance towers, and the Lattice platform connecting them.⁠[5][5][5][5][5][5]

Anduril acquired Dive Technologies, a Boston-based autonomous underwater vehicle company, extending its unmanned systems into the undersea domain; Dive’s main product was the modular autonomous underwater vehicle DIVE-LD.⁠[6][6][6]

The U.S. Air Force announced that Anduril had been selected as one of two vendors to move forward to the next phase of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program, in which it would design, manufacture, and test production-representative unmanned combat aircraft.⁠[7]

Anduril announced a $1.5 billion Series F round co-led by Founders Fund and Sands Capital at a $14 billion valuation, with new investors including Fidelity, Counterpoint Global, and Baillie Gifford. At the same time, the company introduced Arsenal, a software-defined manufacturing platform, and planned to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Arsenal-1, a factory of more than five million square feet that would employ thousands of people and produce tens of thousands of autonomous military systems each year; the company argued that the war in Ukraine had exposed shortfalls in U.S. weapons and munitions production capacity.⁠[8][8][8][8][8]

Anduril deployed its 300th Autonomous Surveillance Tower (AST) for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, providing situational awareness along land and maritime borders.⁠[9]

Anduril announced that it had selected Columbus, Ohio, as the site of Arsenal-1, its first hyperscale manufacturing facility, investing nearly $1 billion of its own money and expecting to create 4,000 direct jobs, plus about 8,500 jobs in supplier, construction, and other sectors.⁠[10][10][10]

In February 2025, the U.S. Army transferred to Anduril the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), a soldier augmented reality headset program originally awarded to MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry with a total budget of $22 billion.⁠[11][11][12]

Anduril announced that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Klas, a Dublin, Ireland–based maker of edge computing and tactical communications equipment, subject to regulatory approval.⁠[13]

Anduril announced a partnership with Meta to design, build, and field, with private funding, a range of extended reality (XR) products for the U.S. military, helping soldiers enhance their perception and intuitively control autonomous platforms on the battlefield.⁠[12][12]

Anduril raised a $2.5 billion Series G round, doubling its valuation to $30.5 billion; Founders Fund invested $1 billion, the largest check the firm has ever written. The company said its revenue doubled in 2024 to about $1 billion. Executive chairman and co-founder Trae Stephens disclosed the round in an interview on Bloomberg TelevisionBloomberg TVBloomberg TV (officially Bloomberg Television) is a global business and financial news television channel owned by Bloomberg L.P. It provides live market news, analysis, and interviews, with separate programming for the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region.Open the full entry.⁠[11][11][11][11]

Anduril received a $159 million U.S. Army contract for an initial prototyping period to develop a night vision and mixed reality system for the Soldier Borne Mission Command program (formerly IVAS Next).⁠[14]

The Royal Australian Navy awarded Anduril Australia a program of record worth A$1.7 billion (about $1.12 billion) to deliver a fleet of Ghost Shark extra-large autonomous undersea vehicles, with production already underway; the vehicle was co-developed and co-funded by the Navy and Anduril and went from concept to production in less than three years.⁠[15][15][15]

The YFQ-44A, developed by Anduril for the Air Force CCA program, began flight testing, taking 556 days from clean-sheet design to first flight.⁠[16]

Arsenal-1 is located in Pickaway County, Ohio. A year after the plant was announced, Building 1 (775,000 square feet of production space) was under construction and Building 2 (more than 924,000 square feet) had broken ground in summer 2025; the company locked in a 10-year buildout to bring the plant to full scale by 2035 and hired more than 50 people for it in 2025. The plant’s first product is the YFQ-44A.⁠[17][17][17][17][17][17]

Anduril announced a $5 billion Series H round at a $61 billion valuation, led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, bringing its total funding raised to more than $11 billion. CEO Brian Schimpf said the company more than doubled its revenue to $2.2 billion in 2025, nearly doubled its workforce, and won and delivered on its first international program of record (with the Royal Australian Navy).⁠[18][19][18]

The U.S. Air Force selected Anduril for the production phase of the CCA program, under which it will deliver an initial set of production FQ-44 semi-autonomous fighter aircraft, with a structure for additional purchases over the following several years. The company said the path from the prototype award in April 2024 and first flight in October 2025 to the production contract in June 2026 was the fastest from prototype to production for a fighter aircraft in more than 50 years.⁠[20][20][20][20]

President Trump announced the Arsenal-2 project: Anduril will invest $3.7 billion in private capital to build a software-defined shipyard at Sparrows Point at Tradepoint Atlantic in Baltimore County, Maryland, manufacturing complex components and large-scale assemblies for Virginia-class attack submarines for final assembly by General Dynamics Electric Boat and Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Newport News Shipbuilding; the Navy also awarded Anduril a contract of up to $2.9 billion with payments tied to demonstrated production outcomes, for a combined total of $6.6 billion. The project is expected to create 3,100 direct jobs, with initial operations expected to begin in 2030.⁠[21][21][21][21][21][21][21][21]

The day after the Arsenal-2 announcement, ABCABCABC (American Broadcasting Company) is an American commercial broadcast television network. It grew out of NBC’s Blue radio network, took its name after becoming independent in 1943, developed into a national television network after merging with United Paramount Theatres in 1953, was acquired by Capital Cities in 1985, and has been owned by The Walt Disney Company since 1996. With CBS and NBC it is one of the three traditional U.S. broadcast networks, and it is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry News published an analysis article that listed the project as the latest example of government funding going to a company with investment ties to President Trump’s sons, asserting that defense companies backed by investments from Donald Trump Jr. and Eric TrumpEric TrumpEric Trump is an American businessman and the second son of US President Donald Trump; he has long served as an executive at the family business, the Trump Organization, and ran it with his older brother while his father was president. Since 2024 he has been one of the main public faces of the Trump family’s crypto businesses, co-founding World Liberty Financial and the Bitcoin mining company American Bitcoin.Open the full entry, including Anduril, had received more than $6 billion in active or promised government contracts since those investments were made. The article asserted that 1789 Capital1789 Capital1789 Capital is a venture capital and investment management firm headquartered in Palm Beach, Florida, United States, founded by Omeed Malik, Chris Buskirk, and Rebekah Mercer, with Donald Trump Jr. as a partner since November 2024. The firm has invested in several defense and technology companies that have received US government contracts, drawing inquiries from congressional Democrats, and the firm has denied any conflict of interest.Open the full entry, a venture capital firm that lists Donald Trump Jr. as one of six partners, took a “major stake” in Anduril in the company’s $2.5 billion funding round in June 2025, and further asserted that Anduril had since been awarded 135 more U.S. government contracts and had received about $1.8 billion in total from them. Anduril did not respond to ABC News’s request for comment.⁠[22][22][22][22][22]

Before this, Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, and Tammy Duckworth and Representative Robert Garcia had jointly written to the Pentagon’s inspector general, Platte B. Moring III, asking for an investigation into Defense Department contracts awarded to companies affiliated with President Trump’s two sons and for a review of whether protocols to prohibit conflicts of interest were being followed.⁠[23][23][23][23]

A spokesperson for the Trump brothers denied any wrongdoing, saying that the two men’s investment decisions were based solely on their independent business judgment and personal convictions and that they do not seek to influence, direct, or participate in any government decision, procurement, or award; the White House declined to comment.⁠[22][22][22]

Palmer Luckey pushed back on X the same day, saying that Anduril had provided the reporter who wrote the article with the actual numbers: 1789 Capital had invested only $50 million in total in Anduril, and the so-called “major stake” was about one-thousandth of the company. 1789 Capital spokesperson Alexa Henning also denied that the firm held a “major stake” in Anduril, accusing the reporter of conflating the total size of funding rounds involving multiple investors with the money invested by 1789 Capital itself. ABC News took the article down less than a day after publication; the original URL returned a 404 error, and ABC News issued no public correction, editor’s note, or explanation.⁠[24][25][25][25][25][26]

Anduril Industries: Official website: https://www.anduril.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[21]

X: Public account: https://x.com/anduriltech (opens in a new window)⁠[21]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/anduril (opens in a new window)⁠[21]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Anduril (opens in a new window)⁠[21]