Defense technology company Anduril Industries announced it has raised $2.5 billion in funding at a valuation of $30.5 billion post-money. This funding round more than doubled the valuation from last year ($14 billion), following Anduril’s $1.5 billion raise.
Founders Fund itself invested $1 billion in this round. Additionally, other investors in the company increased their commitments from previous rounds for this Series G raise. Anduril Executive Chairman Trae Stephens is a partner at Founders Fund.
Stephens said that this funding round would provide the company with the opportunity to continue growing its team and infrastructure. It would also help the company ramp up and deploy capital into addressing manufacturing and production issues that the company is currently working on.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Stephens was asked whether this would be the last round before an IPO, and Stephens replied that there are a lot of ways to raise capital. While this is a possibility for the long-term, the company is not on a “rapid path to doing that.” This means that the company might consider raising a private round of capital before going public.
“We’re always surprised how much demand there is in these massively oversubscribed rounds,” added Stephens. And this funding round was 8-10x of the capacity that they had planned to take on.
What Anduril does: Anduril develops several products that support American defense. This includes drones and the software for controlling them. The company is also developing augmented reality helmets. And the company’s Autonomous Surveillance Towers are used for border patrol.
Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey is known for previous selling his company Oculus VR to Meta (Facebook). Luckey was fired from Facebook in 2016 following political donations to a pro-Donald Trump campaign. At the time Facebook said that his departure was not related to political views, but Luckey claimed this was not the case.
Late last month, Anduril and Meta announced a partnership in which the companies will be designing and building a range of integrated XR products that provide warfighters with enhanced perception and intuitive control of autonomous platforms on the battlefield.
