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The Anduril Industries headquarters in Costa Mesa, California, US, on Thursday, Dec. 14, 2023. Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Defense tech startup Anduril Industries has raised $2.5 billion at a $30.5 billion valuation, including the new capital, Chairman Trae Stephens said on Thursday.
“As we continue working on building a company that has the capacity to scale into the largest problems for the national security community, we thought it was really important to shore up the balance sheet and make sure we have the ability to deploy capital into these manufacturing and production problem sets that we’re working on,” Stephens told Bloomberg TV at the publication’s tech summit in San Francisco.
Reports of the latest financing surfaced in February, around the same time the company took over Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar augmented reality headset program with the U.S. Army. Last week, Anduril announced a deal with Meta to create virtual and augmented reality devices intended for use by the Army.
The latest funding round, which doubles Anduril’s valuation from August, was led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. The venture firm contributed $1 billion, said Stephens, who’s also a partner at the firm.
Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus and Anduril Industries, speaks during The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech Live conference in Laguna Beach, California on October 16, 2023.Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images
Stephens said it’s the largest check Founders Fund has ever written.
Since its founding in 2017 by Oculus creator Palmer Luckey, Anduril has been working to shake up the defense contractor space currently dominated by Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.
Anduril has been a member of the CNBC Disruptor 50 list three times and ranked as No. 2 last year.
Luckey founded Anduril after his ousting from Facebook, which acquired Oculus in 2014 and later made the virtual reality headsets the centerpiece of its metaverse efforts.
Stephens emphasized the importance of the recent partnership between the two sides, and “Palmer being able to go back to his roots and reach a point of forgiveness with the Meta team.”
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In April, Founders Fund closed a $4.6 billion late-stage venture fund, according to a filing with the SEC. A substantial amount of the capital was provided by the firm’s general partners, including Stephens, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC at the time.
Anduril is one of the most highly valued private tech companies in the U.S. and has been able to reel in large sums of venture money during a period of few big exits and IPOs. While the IPO market is showing signs of life after a three-plus year drought, Anduril isn’t planning to head in that direction just yet, Stephens said.
“Long term we continue to believe that Anduril is the shape of a publicly traded company,” Stephens said. “We’re not in any rapid path to doing that. We’re certainly going through the processes required to prepare for doing something like that in the medium term. Right now we’re just focused on the mission at hand, going at this as hard as we can.”
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