Anduril Went From Punchline to $61 Billion. Is It Worth It?
By Mason Trinkner · · 8 min read
Good morning, Mason here,
Today's issue is different. One company, start to finish.
In 2017, Palmer Luckey had just left Facebook and decided to build weapons. Most of Silicon Valley thought that was a bad idea.
Nine years later, Anduril is worth $61 billion, did $2.2 billion in revenue last year and just signed on to build a submarine shipyard with the Navy.
Investors are reportedly talking about $100 billion next.
One company. One question.
Is any of this worth the price?
Read time: 8 mins
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THE DEEP DIVE
THE ORIGIN |
A Fired VR Founder Picked the Least Popular Industry in Tech |
Palmer Luckey (left) talks with U.S. Space Force Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant at Los Angeles Air Force Base, August 2026. Photo: U.S. Space Force
Who goes from VR headsets to weapons? Palmer Luckey, apparently. He sold Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014, at 21.
Then came 2016. Luckey later told 60 Minutes, "I gave $9,000 to a political group that was for Donald Trump and against Hillary Clinton." By March 2017 he was out. Facebook says politics weren't the reason, and it's stuck to that.
Weeks later, Anduril existed. Luckey started it with Trae Stephens from Founders Fund plus Brian Schimpf, Matt Grimm and Joe Chen, and Founders Fund put in the first money. The name? Straight out of Tolkien. Andúril is Aragorn's sword, the "Flame of the West," which tells you a lot about how these guys saw themselves.
The pitch was simple and, back then, unpopular. "The idea behind Anduril was to build not a defense contractor but a defense products company," Luckey said. After Google walked away from the Pentagon's Project Maven in 2018, when its own employees protested, Anduril quietly picked up Maven work. Most of tech wanted nothing to do with the military. Anduril wanted nothing else.
THE PRODUCT |
It Started With a Tower on the Border |
The cameras and radar on an Anduril Sentry tower near CA-98 in Imperial County, Calif. Photo: EFF via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)
Anduril's first real product wasn't a drone or a missile. It was a solar-powered surveillance tower. In 2018 it piloted the system on the Texas border, and in July 2020 Customs and Border Protection made the towers a program of record, with plans to field 200 of them in a deal the EFF put at about $250 million.
It was controversial from day one. Civil liberties groups like the EFF mapped the towers and criticized them. But the towers mattered for a reason most people missed: they ran Lattice, the software that turned out to be the actual product.
Lattice pulls in data from cameras, radar and drones, figures out what it's looking at, and lets one operator manage a lot of machines at once. Anduril's drones, interceptors and missiles all plug into it, from the Ghost helicopter drone to the Roadrunner interceptor to Barracuda cruise missiles to the Fury fighter drone.
That's the trick. Hardware wins the contract. Software keeps the customer. In March, Lattice sat at the center of an Army contract worth up to $20 billion.
THE BUSINESS MODEL |
Anduril Spends Its Own Money First |
Arsenal-1 outside Columbus, Ohio. Image: Anduril
As Luckey tells it, traditional defense contractors get paid to do the work whether or not it succeeds. Anduril flipped that. "A products company has a very different mentality. You're putting in your own money," he said.
Arsenal-1 is the proof. Anduril sank about $1 billion into a factory outside Columbus, Ohio. Fury production started there in March, and the first production jet rolled off the line on July 27. At full speed the line can build 150 aircraft a year.
The new submarine shipyard runs the same playbook. Arsenal-2 in Maryland costs $6.6 billion. Anduril is putting in $3.7 billion and the Navy up to $2.9 billion, paid based on what actually gets produced. In Anduril's words, "Anduril, not the taxpayer, takes on the majority of the execution risk."
THE CONTRACTS |
From Border Towers to Fighter Drones in Six Years |
The YFQ-44A Fury. Photo: U.S. Air Force
If I had to pick the moment Anduril stopped being a curiosity, it's April 2024. That's when the Air Force chose it, along with General Atomics, to build the first batch of its drone wingmen, the Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Lockheed, Northrop and Boeing all lost. Fury flew for the first time on Oct. 31, 2025, less than two years after the concept, and this June the Air Force ordered production.
The wins kept stacking. A $967.6 million counter-drone deal with Special Operations Command in 2022. Microsoft's Army headset program, IVAS, in 2025. An A$1.7 billion Ghost Shark submarine drone order from Australia that September. A slice of up to $3.2 billion in Space Force prototype awards for space-based interceptors this April. Plus the Army deal in March and the Navy shipyard this month.
Read the fine print, though. The Army deal is a ceiling, not cash, and its first order was $87 million. And not everything has worked. Last November, Reuters reported Altius drones crashing in Air Force tests and early Ghost drones struggling against Russian jamming in Ukraine. Anduril called those "isolated examples" across hundreds of tests.
THE MONEY |
From $1 Billion to $61 Billion in Seven Years |
Anduril co-founder Trae Stephens of Founders Fund at a 2024 TechCrunch event. Photo: TechCrunch via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
If you charted the valuation, it would basically go straight up. Anduril was worth about $1 billion in 2019, a year after its first border pilot. By 2022 it was $8.5 billion, and by 2024, $14 billion. Then it really took off. Founders Fund put in $1 billion in June 2025, its biggest check ever, at $30.5 billion, and this May Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz led a $5 billion Series H at $61 billion.
So did the business keep up with the price? Mostly. Anduril says sales doubled to $2.2 billion last year, from about $1 billion in 2024. And this year? The Information says Anduril is telling investors around $4.3 billion, while losing roughly $1.2 billion on an operating basis. Then in July, Reuters said Anduril was in talks at close to $100 billion. Anduril's response: no decisions have been made.
Even the CEO admits how strange this would have sounded at the start. Here's Brian Schimpf in May: "When we founded Anduril in 2017, defense was not a category that attracted significant venture investment." On the Private Company Index we just launched, Anduril is No. 10, and it's raised more than $11 billion along the way.
THE COMPETITION |
Anduril Isn't Really Competing With Startups. It's Competing With Lockheed. |
A U.S. soldier inspects an Anduril Ghost X drone during an exercise in Germany, January 2025. Photo: U.S. Army
The other defense startups are a lot smaller. Shield AI was valued at $12.7 billion in March. Saronic hit $9.25 billion the same month. Put them together and Anduril is still worth nearly three times as much.
The real comparison is the primes. Lockheed Martin did about $75 billion in sales last year and is worth around $117 billion. Anduril is worth about half of that with roughly 3 percent of the revenue.
That gap is the whole bet. Investors aren't paying for what Anduril sells today. They're paying for the idea that the Pentagon keeps moving money from slow, traditional programs to companies that build first and sell after. If that shift keeps going, today's $61 billion price could look like a bargain five years from now. If it stalls? Then $100 billion is going to look like the top.
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THE VERDICT: IS $61 BILLION JUSTIFIED?
Six parts. It really comes down to two arguments.
The bull case is easy to make. Revenue has doubled two years straight. Anduril builds its own factories and writes its own software. And it's now part of programs meant to run for years: fighter drones, Army command and control, Navy submarines, even space.
The bear case is just as real. Anduril reportedly expects to lose around $1.2 billion this year. Its biggest deals are ceilings, not cash. A lot of its momentum lines up with one administration's priorities. And some of its hardware has crashed in testing.
The math. I ran the numbers. At $61 billion, investors are paying about 28 times last year's revenue, or around 14 times what Anduril reportedly expects this year. At $100 billion it's 45 times and 23 times. For context, Lockheed sells for about 1.6 times its revenue.
The test: picture Anduril hitting $15 billion in revenue by 2030. That means about 37 percent growth every year from here. Now give it 4 times sales, which would be generous for a defense company. You get $60 billion, roughly what it's worth today. Put differently, today's price already assumes the next four years go right, and $100 billion assumes a lot more than that.
For investors: Don't ask whether Anduril is a great company. It probably is.
Ask how much of the next five years you're already paying for.
Mason's take: Anduril did something rare. It didn't just build a better product, it changed how an entire industry buys. It made venture capital care about defense and made the Pentagon shop like a customer. I think it's the real thing. I just wouldn't invest at a $100 billion valuation until those contract ceilings start turning into actual revenue.
Founderscrowd Newsletter | Monday, October 12, 2026 | The Anduril deep dive
$1B in 2019. $61B in 2026. $100B next?
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