start-up of defense Anduril Industries, whose valuation is $14 billion, revealed on Wednesday that it has raised $1.5 billion for its Series F round of fundraising.
Anduril, a three-time CNBC Disruptor 50 business that came in at number two in 2024, announced that it plans to strengthen its supply chain and procedures, hire more staff, and develop its infrastructure with the help of the latest capital round. The company stated that it will also utilize the money to invest in Arsenal, a manufacturing platform that will power a brand-new, 500,000-square-foot facility known as “Arsenal-1,” which will be able to produce tens of thousands of autonomous military systems annually.
After a $1.5 billion Series E in 2022, the company’s valuation increased to $8.5 billion, which is now $14 billion. Founders Fund and Sands Capital co-led this most recent round, which also included new investors Baillie Gifford, Counterpoint Global, and Fidelity Management & Research Company. To date, Anduril has raised almost $3.7 billion in donations.
Since its founding in 2017, Anduril has sought to upend established defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman by developing its own products and then selling them to customers, as opposed to the conventional military approach of contracting and then building.
In order to enable human-assisted robotics systems to carry out difficult tasks, the U.S. military and its allies utilize Anduril’s Lattice AI-powered command and control software, which was introduced in a number of new drones last year.
This company’s efforts to enhance the manufacturing processes around autonomous weapons systems come at a critical moment, as the Ukraine crisis has put the defense industrial industry to the test. According to Anduril, the battle has shown a critical flaw in the crisis response skills of the United States of America. The business highlighted that lead times to restock essential weapons and ammunition average two years. “The ability to respond quickly to need has been hindered by slow and low production rates, inflexible processes, and the development of exquisite, defense-specific, bespoke systems,” the statement reads.
“These lower-cost, higher volume, smarter systems — we believe that’s going to determine the nations who are successful going forward,” Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf stated in a May episode of “Closing Bell: Overtime.”