Anduril Industries announced it has secured $1.5 billion of funding for its Series F round to hyperscale defense manufacturing. This funding round will enable Anduril to increase hiring, enhance processes, upgrade tooling, increase resiliency in its supply chain, and expand infrastructure. The funding round – which was co-led by Founders Fund and Sands Capital – values the company at $14 billion and includes new investors Fidelity Management & Research Company, Counterpoint Global, and Baillie Gifford, and significant commitments from existing investors including Altimeter and Franklin Venture Partners.
Anduril also revealed it invests in Arsenal, the manufacturing platform for modern warfare. With Arsenal, Anduril’s goal is to produce tens of thousands of autonomous weapons systems that address the urgent needs of the US and our allies.
As the US and the allies attempt to gain affordable mass with autonomous systems, weapons, and munitions, the defense industrial base has to be be capable of producing orders of magnitude more than it is currently producing today. And to support that effort, Anduril is investing its own resources to hyperscale weapons manufacturing using the same agile, rapid, and scalable processes found in the commercial manufacturing sector.
The Ukraine conflict has exposed a critical vulnerability in the US’ ability to respond to crisis. And in a major conflict, use of weapons and munitions would quickly exceed supply, it is projected that the US would run out of weapons in the first few weeks. At the same time, the traditional defense industrial base would face significant challenges in scaling production to meet demands. The slow and low production rates, inflexible processes and the development of exquisite, defense-specific, bespoke systems have impacted the ability to respond quickly to need. Plus, lead times to replenish key weapons and munitions average two years.
Arsenal
Arsenal is a software-defined manufacturing platform optimized for the mass production of autonomous systems and weapons. And to achieve hyperscale, the arsenal platform utilizes four principles: design for simplicity and scale, resilient supply chain, software-defined production, and central infrastructure – a factory called Arsenal-1.
Arsenal dismantles the traditional defense production preference for complexity by creating products that are as simple as possible, eliminating unnecessary materials, parts, and specialized processes. And the Arsenal design leverages a nonlinear approach to production, driven by modular and flexible design decisions.
Arsenal uses a commercial supply chain wherever possible, a strategy that brings efficiency and agility to defense production. And nearly 90% of Anduril’s products can be developed and manufactured at hyperscale using commercially available components and materials. The access to this reliable pool of components reduces lead times and production costs.
Arsenal features a common enterprise resource planning system and a proprietary manufacturing execution software system to integrate threat-based operational analysis, modeling, simulation, drawing, testing, bill of materials management, work orders, production, and data management across the product lifecycle.
To join the existing family of factories, Anduril will invest hundreds of millions in the development of Arsenal-1. Upon completion of this deal, Arsenal-1 will be over five million square feet of production space that will employ thousands of people and is designed to produce tens of thousands of autonomous military systems annually.
Arsenal-1 offers maximum flexibility to reallocate the most critical manufacturing resources — people, capital, machines, and materials — for meeting new requirements, launch new products, or scale production to meet surges in demand, indefinitely. This is not possible when those critical resources are spread out across multiple, distributed geographic areas.
Anduril’s focus on agile and responsive manufacturing has already been demonstrated globally. More recently, Anduril announced a $75 million investment to increase Mississippi’s manufacturing and production capacity for solid rocket motors. And Anduril also announced the opening of its Rhode Island production facility to enable Anduril to increase production to 200 AUVs per year. This complements the company’s existing network of factories in California and Georgia, as well as the Ghost Shark factory in Australia.
Anduril is also taking on the risk of developing Arsenal by using its own resources to invest in people, processes, tooling, supply chain resiliency, and infrastructure. And Anduril is committed to transforming US and allied defense capabilities by combining modern software expertise with a differentiated approach to hardware development and manufacturing.
