Thursday, December 14, 2023, Anduril Industries headquarters in Costa Mesa, California, USA.
Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Defense technology startup Anduril announced Wednesday it has raised $5 billion in a funding round led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, doubling its valuation to $61 billion.
CEO Brian Shimp said in a release that the company will “aggressively” invest in manufacturing, research and infrastructure to expand America’s defense systems in the face of heightened geopolitical risks.
The latest funding round doubles Anduril’s valuation from $30.5 billion ahead of its widely anticipated IPO.
Oculus headset developer Palmer Lackey, who founded the company in 2017, said in an interview with CNBC last year that he would “definitely” take the company public.
“When we founded Anduril in 2017, defense wasn’t a category that attracted a lot of venture capital. That’s changed a lot over the last few years,” Schimpf said.
Defense technology startups have had great success in raising funding, including recent rounds from Shield AI, autonomous shipbuilder Saronic, and several space companies.
Anduril is also positioning itself as a major 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 developing a space interceptor for President Trump’s ambitious $185 billion missile defense system called Golden Dome.
This year, Anduril signed a 10-year U.S. Army enterprise contract worth up to $20 billion to acquire a space missile and satellite tracking company.
Anduril is Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX.
The Department of Defense announced Wednesday that the Indre Ile, Core Spire, LeidosZone 5 plans to purchase more than 10,000 low-cost hypersonic missiles over the next three years.
