Palmer Luckey has come a long way since he was hacking virtual reality headsets in a garage. Today, the Oculus VR founder’s defense tech startup Anduril announced that it has raised $1.5 billion in funding and developed a new manufacturing platform to produce “tens of thousands of autonomous weapons” per year.
The funding round, led by Founders Fund and Sands Capital, could help seven-year-old Anduril transform from a high-profile newcomer to the defense industry into a more serious U.S. defense contractor.
It also reflects a shift in military thinking, as policymakers adapt to the prospect of battlefields dominated not just by tanks and fighter jets, but also by drones and artificial intelligence. They seek ways to boost America’s capacity to produce military hardware to match that of a potential adversary like China.
Moreover, Anduril is betting that it can turn the tech industry’s lean, efficient approach to manufacturing into a new way to mass-produce weapons systems. The company says it has developed an AI-powered manufacturing platform, dubbed Arsenal, to speed up production of its growing arsenal of drones and other hardware.
Greg Allen, an expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says the Pentagon is getting more serious about working with nontraditional defense contractors and investing in small, low-cost, autonomous systems. “The stars are aligned for the [Department of Defense] “Changing the approach, new companies coming in with a different approach and the venture capital community finally being willing to put a lot of money on the line to change things,” he says.
Anduril says Arsenal will follow the approach that companies like Apple and Tesla use in high-tech manufacturing. This means designing products with production in mind and using software to monitor and optimize production processes. The company also says it will rely on a more resilient supply chain, sourcing components primarily from the U.S. or allied countries.
The company says it will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build the first such factory, the sleek Arsenal-1, at an undisclosed location. Anduril has already expanded production capacity in recent years, with a plant in Mississippi to build solid rocket motors and another in Rhode Island to produce drones.
Rendering of Anduril's planned Arsenal-1 factory.Anduril
