Grimm: Casting drone frames is cheaper at scale but costs hundreds of thousands to tool
Matt Grimm · Full Anduril R&D Tour: Matt Grimm, Co-Founder & COO · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea · Dec 17, 2025 · at 23:32
Anduril COO Matt Grimm discusses hardware iteration trade-offs between CNC milling and metal casting during a tour of Anduril's machine shop.
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“Taking a huge brick of metal. Yeah. And then using a mill to, like, cut all of these things out is very expensive, very wasteful, takes a long, long, long time. These machines are expensive, our machinists are expensive, they're very talented, so, like, taking that time to cut all of these things out It's not the most efficient way. What you should be doing is casting these. So you create a mold, you dump, you pour metal in, cure it, then you get this out of the end. The problem is that setting up those molds and that tooling for that casting is very time consuming and comically expensive. Yeah. So it takes many, many, many months and many hundreds of thousands of dollars to get that tool in just right.”
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