The Anduril Industries headquarters in Costa Mesa, California, US, on Thursday, Dec. 14, 2023.
Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Defense tech startup Anduril on Wednesday said it raised $5 billion, doubling its valuation to $61 billion in a funding round led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.
CEO Brian Schimpf said in a release that the company will “aggressively” invest in manufacturing, research and infrastructure to scale defense systems for the U.S. as it faces rising geopolitical risks.
The latest funding round doubles Anduril’s valuation from $30.5 billion ahead of a widely anticipated IPO.
Oculus headset creator Palmer Luckey, who founded the company in 2017, said he would “definitely” take the company public in an interview with CNBC last year.
“When we founded Anduril in 2017, defense was not a category that attracted significant venture investment. That has changed meaningfully over the last several years,” Schimpf said.
Defense tech startups have seen a bonanza in funding, including recent rounds from Shield AI, autonomous shipmaker Saronic, and several space companies.
Anduril is also positioning itself as a key beneficiary of the U.S. government’s race to reindustrialize the U.S. military under President Donald Trump.
The company recently joined a group of companies working on space interceptors for Trump’s ambitious $185 billion missile defense system dubbed the Golden Dome.
This year, Anduril landed a 10-year U.S. Army enterprise contract with a $20 billion ceiling and acquired a space missile and satellite tracking company.
Anduril is also one of several Silicon Valley-backed firms shaking up the defense contractor space dominated by companies like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and RTX.
The Department of Defense on Wednesday also announced an agreement with Andruil, CoAspire, Leidos, and Zone 5 to buy more than 10,000 low-cost hypersonic missiles over the next three years.
