COSTA MESA, Calif., July 19 — Anduril Industries, the defence technology firm founded by Oculus VR creator Palmer Luckey in 2017, has quietly become one of the most consequential contractors reshaping how the Pentagon buys its kit. Based here in Costa Mesa, the company now sits at $8.4 billion in valuation and has a $1.5 billion contract to supply drone systems to the U.S. military. The numbers, as ever, tell only part of the story.
Under the hood, Anduril’s core offering is the Lattice AI platform — a system that integrates sensors and drones into a single battlefield awareness layer. The technical reality is that Lattice is designed to let a small number of operators manage swarms of unmanned aircraft, a capability that has traditionally required a room full of analysts.
Complementing Lattice is the Ghost 4 quadcopter, already in service with U.S. Special Operations Command. The quadcopter’s precise endurance and payload specs are classified, but the detail that matters is that it flies autonomously on Lattice’s orchestration software, not on a gamepad.
The Anduril Playbook
Anduril has raised over $2.8 billion in venture funding, including a round in 2024 from 1789 Capital, the investment firm linked to Trump administration allies. The influx has allowed Luckey’s firm to scale production of its drone systems and continue refining Lattice. The company’s valuation hit $8.4 billion in 2024 — a steep climb from its founding just seven years earlier, when Luckey pivoted from consumer virtual reality to autonomous defence hardware.
The Pentagon took notice early. In 2023, Anduril secured a $1.5 billion contract to supply drone systems, a deal that marked a significant break from the traditional procurement model dominated by primes like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.
Those legacy contractors still command the bulk of the defence budget, but Anduril’s rapid cycle times and software-first approach are forcing the Pentagon to re-examine how it buys technology.
Palantir’s Parallel Path
Anduril is not alone in this shift. Palantir Technologies, founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel and a group of former PayPal engineers, has been operating in the same space for longer. Its Gotham and Foundry data analytics platforms are widely used by U.S. military and intelligence agencies for intelligence fusion and operational planning.
The company went public via a direct listing in September 2020, and by early 2025 its market capitalisation had exceeded $60 billion. Palantir’s government contracts have grown under the Trump administration — a $458 million contract from the U.S. Army in 2024 being the most recent large award.
The detail that matters here is that while Palantir and Anduril operate in different niches — data analytics versus autonomous hardware — both represent a push by the Department of Defence to buy from younger, more agile technology firms rather than the traditional primes. Securities filings have disclosed that Donald Trump’s sons hold investments in both companies, positioning them squarely at the centre of this trend.
The nature and size of those holdings have not been publicly detailed, but the disclosure itself underscores the intertwining of Trump family business interests with the burgeoning defence-tech ecosystem.
What to Watch
The question for Anduril and Palantir is whether they can sustain their growth trajectories without losing the agility that got them the contracts in the first place. Scaling manufacturing for hardware like the Ghost 4 quadcopter is a different challenge from scaling software licences for Gotham. Anduril’s $2.8 billion venture war chest gives it runway, but the technical reality is that building autonomous systems that the Pentagon trusts in contested environments requires constant hardware iteration — not just algorithm updates.
For now, both firms remain at the sharp end of a procurement revolution. As ever, the detail that matters will be in the next contract award — and whether the primes start to respond in kind.
Sources
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