It's "go time" for Anduril after defense-tech hat trick
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Anduril Industries headquarters in Costa Mesa, California. Photo: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Anduril Industries is on a hot streak.
Why it matters: The neo-prime is biting off bigger and bigger chunks of the defense-contracting pie.
- In 2019, it deployed a handful of sentry towers alongside U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Now, it's scheming to build and fly robo-wingmen for the military.
What they're saying: "Over the last eight years, Anduril has been consistent in our view of modern warfare: The physics of the battlefield have changed, permanently. Projecting power increasingly demands the ability to amass tons of effects over long distances," chief business officer Matt Steckman told Axios.
- "Superior software and massive quantities of hardware are indispensable to this task," he said.
- "We are not celebrating views shifting towards our way of thinking. The proof is whether you can build, whether you can scale. It's go time."
The big picture: In the past few weeks, Anduril publicized:
A $1.1 billion deal for a fleet of Australian Ghost Shark extra-large autonomous submarines.
- Shane Arnott, a senior vice president at Anduril, told reporters that program success means Australia's navy will be among "the biggest operators of subsea robots in the world."
A $159 million prototyping arrangement for the U.S. Army's Soldier Borne Mission Command effort. (Rivet Industries, a startup with Palantir Technologies ties, also secured a $195 million deal.)
- Palmer Luckey, the founder of Anduril, told reporters his company's "been building a lot of the underpinnings of SBMC for years." It was "one of the first things that we started working on, using our own money."
- If Anduril hadn't been selected, "I'd be having some really hard meetings with my investors, who had been insisting for quite a while that this seemed to be the continuation of me having a pissing contest with Meta over who can build better head-mounted displays."
A contract for "conceptual designs" of U.S. Navy drone wingmen, similar to the Air Force's Collaborative Combat Aircraft initiative. (Boeing, General Atomics and Northrop Grumman are also in the running.)
- An Anduril spokesperson told reporters the company is dialed in to the "Navy's distinct needs" and plans to deliver "at a rapid speed and formidable scale."
Follow the money: Anduril is the 93rd-largest defense contractor in the world when ranked by defense revenue, according to the Defense News Top 100. But it's muscling its way into competition with the big boys higher up the list.
- The company's wins, above, span different countries and different domains — land, air and sea.
- It was valued at more than $30 billion as of June.
Between the lines: The West Coast weapons bros are influencing how the Pentagon thinks, tries and buys.
Go deeper: In remote Texas, Anduril probes future of drone warfare
