Anduril Industries, a defence tech firm co-founded by Palmer Luckey, has now secured $2.5 billion in new venture capital. This investment brings the company’s valuation to $30.5 billion, more than twice its valuation of approximately $13 billion recorded in August of the previous year.
The Series G funding round included the participation from Founders Fund, a venture capital firm associated with Peter Thiel, which put in $1 billion. Trae Stephens, Anduril’s Executive Chairman and a partner at Founders Fund, confirmed the investment on Bloomberg Television, stating this represents the largest single investment ever made by Founders Fund. Other existing investors also contributed to the round, which was oversubscribed, and investor demand outpaced the available stock by a factor of eight to ten.
The newly acquired capital will be used to further boost Anduril’s financial position and fuel its production and manufacturing goals. Stephens stated the funds are essential for building the company’s capacity to address major challenges facing national security organizations. The capital will be used to expand the infrastructure needed to produce defense hardware as well.
The eight-year-old Anduril currently specializes in creating autonomous systems and software for defense applications. Its product range includes drones capable of carrying weapons (such as the Ghost, Altius, and Anvil series), Lattice (an open software platform) software for command and control, and augmented reality headsets designed for military use. The company’s stated objective is to update national defense capabilities through the integration of tech such as AI and autonomous systems.
Recent times have seen the firm invest nearly $1 billion of its own capital into Arsenal-1, aiming for a “hyperscale” production capacity of tens of thousands of autonomous systems annually. This facility, positioned near Rickenbacker International Airport, is projected to create over 4,000 direct jobs. In addition to this, the company has appeared multiple times on the CNBC Disruptor 50 list, even making it to second place last year. While the market for initial public offerings (IPOs) shows some signs of increased activity, Stephens indicated that Anduril does not have immediate plans for a public listing.
The company reported a near doubling of its revenue to approximately $1 billion in 2024 and secured contracts totaling around $1.5 billion in value. Anduril has also taken on central roles in large U.S. Army contracts. In February, the company took over responsibility for Microsoft’s multi-billion dollar augmented reality headset program for soldiers, a program initially budgeted at $22 billion. This was followed by a partnership announcement last week with Meta Platforms Inc. to develop virtual and augmented reality devices for the same project. This also marked a public reconciliation between Palmer Luckey and Meta, his former employer, after a period of strained relations following Facebook’s (now Meta’s) acquisition of Oculus in 2014 and Luckey’s subsequent departure.
