Anduril Industries

Anduril Industries was founded in 2017 in Orange County, California by Palmer Luckey , the entrepreneur behind the Oculus virtual-reality headset, together with Trae Stephens of Founders Fund and three former Palantir engineers — Brian Schimpf, Matt Grimm, and Joe Chen. Schimpf has run the company as chief executive since the start, with Grimm as chief operating officer and Luckey as the public face and chairman. The headquarters in Costa Mesa, California has been joined by engineering and manufacturing sites in Atlanta, Boston, Mississippi, and Sydney, and the company employs roughly seven thousand people.

The product catalogue has widened sharply over the past five years. Lattice, the original offering, is an AI command-and-control layer that ingests sensor feeds and fuses them into a shared operating picture; it underpins almost everything else the company sells. Sentry Tower is a solar-powered autonomous surveillance pole — around 290 of them now stand along the southern border of the United States for Customs and Border Protection. Ghost and Ghost X are single-rotor reconnaissance drones with about a hundred minutes of endurance; Bolt and Bolt-M are 12-pound backpack quadcopters, the latter carrying a munition. ALTIUS-600M and 700M are tube-launched loitering munitions inherited through the 2021 acquisition of Area-I, with ranges up to 160 kilometres and loiter times around 75 minutes. Roadrunner is a twin-turbojet, vertically launched reusable interceptor that sits somewhere between a drone and a missile. Barracuda is a family of air-breathing cruise missiles reaching 800 kilometres. At sea, Dive-LD and the smaller Copperhead form a pair of autonomous underwater vehicles, with Copperhead variants approaching torpedo-class capability. Fury, redesignated YFQ-44A by the US Air Force, is a subsonic stealthy collaborative combat aircraft that flew for the first time on 31 October 2025.

Customers are concentrated in the US Department of Defense and allied militaries. The US Army selected Ghost for its Company-Level Small UAS programme, and Fury was picked alongside General Atomics’ YFQ-42A as one of the two Air Force collaborative combat aircraft entering competitive prototyping. Ukraine has received Ghost, ALTIUS, and other systems, drawing on lessons from a war that has rewritten what loitering munitions are expected to do. Australia partnered with Anduril on the Ghost Shark extra-large autonomous undersea vehicle, with first delivery to the Royal Australian Navy in 2025. The United Kingdom and a number of NATO members have ordered ALTIUS variants.

Funding has come from Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, 8VC, General Catalyst, and others. A Series F in August 2024 raised $1.5 billion at a $14 billion valuation, used in part to break ground on Arsenal-1, a five-million-square-foot weapons factory in Pickaway County, Ohio. Subsequent rounds have lifted the implied valuation considerably higher.

Anduril attracts the kind of attention that comes with its mandate. Luckey’s 2017 departure from Facebook after a political-donations dispute drew steady press; activist groups have criticised the company’s border-surveillance work and the broader question of autonomy in lethal systems. Inside the defence industry, its model — building products on private capital and then selling them, rather than waiting on cost-plus contracts — has become the template a wave of newer entrants is trying to copy.