The Ledger
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Singerman says no single Anduril founder could have built the company alone
“The Andurl founding team are all so complimentary to each other and different, but respect each other so much and are good in different ways that Not any one of them, not any one of the four of them could have, like, pulled this off, but I do think that the co…”
Gil: Parker Conrad and Palmer Luckey were unfairly thrown under the bus
“Palmer Luckey is another one where I backed Andrew in the very first round, and he was controversial given what happened at Meta early on with him. I think in both cases, they basically got thrown under the bus in one form or another.”
Lowery: Anduril is pursuing a 'me too' strategy against China's manufacturing
“There's an element, one, of folks doing me too, like Andrew's very me too to China. They said, we're going to go toe to toe. We're going to manufacturing in volume. We're going to build computers. We're going to build drones. We're going to build everything th…”
Only Anduril, Palantir, and SpaceX have delivered defense tech at scale
“Other than those three, there isn't really, like, a, like, unicorn VC-backed company that, like, has actually delivered things at scale for the Warfighter that doesn't really exist.”
Luckey: Anduril beat Boeing, Northrop, and Lockheed for USAF contract
“So we were competing against Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and in the end, Andrel beat all of them.”
Stephens: Massive advisory boards of retired military generals never work for defense companies
“There's a long history in Companies that are doing business with the department where they have these massive advisory boards of retired generals and things like that, and it was just clear that that's never worked, and so that was never really part of our str…”
Luckey: Anduril beat Boeing, Lockheed, and Northrop for fighter contract
“We were competing against Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and in the end, Andrew beat all of them, which was really really gratifying to, you know, go from starting this company to going toe to toe with the guys who are legends of the fighter commun…”
Luckey: Anduril built optically invisible drones around 2019–2020
“Building drones that are invisible to the human eye at the ranges that you're using them, it's not just like a hypothetical. Andrew did this in like, 2019, 20 20.”
Little: Private Capital Will Flee Defense Tech if Anduril and Saronic Fail
“The part that worries me the most is, I want the Andrel, Ceronics, and Sail Drones, though, to do well. Because if they don't do well, private capital will recognize, like they did previously, that this isn't a good market to be in.”
Power: There will not be more SpaceXs or new defense primes
“I don't think there's going to be more SpaceX's. I don't think there's going to be more Andrews, you know, of like new defense primes or neo primes, and I don't think there's going to be more than a handful of large industrials companies.”
Schendel: The energy industry lacks a disruptive equivalent to SpaceX or Anduril
“I think the energy industry is actually in a pretty similar spot That the aerospace industry or the defense industry was in, in, in the last decade. The difference is that the energy industry doesn't have a SpaceX and it doesn't have an Android role. And we st…”
The defense tech market will support only one or two next-generation primes
“There's not going to be, like, five Andrels. Like, there's probably going to be an Andrel. There may be, like, a number two. That's probably about it, you know, in that sphere of, like, next generation Defense Prime.”
McCormick: Anduril's early round was crowded at a $100M valuation
“But that, like, early story that, like, nobody wanted to touch it was actually, like, a pretty crowded round at a hundred million dollar valuation.”
Suster: Defense tech startups like Anduril are critical for future warfare
“I would argue that's why companies like Anduril are so important, because the future battleground are going to require a new type of weapon, a new type of defense system, that if we don't develop it, the Russians will, the Chinese will, the Koreans will, and I…”
Mark Suster calls Anduril the most important private company besides SpaceX
“So you look recently at Anduril, probably the most important company In the private markets behind SpaceX.”
Power: Series B is the riskiest stage to underwrite deep tech startups
“The way I would underwrite deep tech is basically like series B is the biggest risk point because you're starting to tip real money at the company. C and D is like what's already working. It's a fucking near monopoly. C to A is like, well, it's insane. And you…”
Harrison: Anduril is actively working on subterranean warfare technology
“Like several people are working on that, including Anduril, much to the surprise, I don't know if you have heard this story, but there was a story of Palmer talking about subterranean warfare, and the marketing person at Anduril was there, it was like, to the …”
Harrison: Anduril took over Microsoft's $22B IVAS contract for EagleEye
“And then a year ago Microsoft basically admitted defeat to some extent, and the government said, we're going to recompete the contract, and Anduril first as a potential partner to Microsoft, and then eventually took over a twenty-two billion dollar IVAS contra…”
Harrison: Only a small handful of new defense primes will emerge
“There's not going to be 30 new defense primes. There's probably going to be a very small handful of companies that can check all the boxes you need to be able to do that. Obviously, I think Android can be one of them, and there's maybe a few others”
Luckey: Anduril built visually invisible Ghost drones around 2019 or 2020
“So building drones that are invisible to the human eye at the ranges that you're using them, it's not just, like, a hypothetical. Andrew did this in, like, 2019, 20”
Luckey: Anduril Sentry Towers cover about 35% of US southern border
“We're covering about 35% of the U.S. Southern border now.”
Luckey: Fury is the first autonomous fighter procured by US Air Force
“This is the first autonomous fighter that the United States Air Force has ever procured.”
Luckey: Anduril took Fury from contract to flight in 556 days
“We went from signing a contract with the Air Force to first flight in 556 days. Which is, as far as I know, the fastest new fighter development program since the end of the Korean War.”
Luckey: Anduril made Fury landing gear heavier so any US machine shop can make it
“Fury's landing gear is a few percent heavier than it could have been, because we could have either made it manufacturable by only two places in the entire United States, or any machine shop in the entire country.”
Luckey: Self-funding defense products creates better speed incentives
“Instead, we're investing our own money in building what we think the right products are, and then we sell them to the government. So we want to be going to the government Generally, with a product rather than a PowerPoint, or at least a prototype instead of a …”
Stephens: Anduril builds autonomous fighter planes near the Wright brothers' site
“In some ways it's like you're starting with the right flyer and then coming back with fully autonomous fighter plans to be built, you know, less than an hour drive. Away from where the Wright brothers were building the first airplane.”
Stephens: Despite its massive hardware, Anduril is fundamentally a software company
“People will think about us as like a hardware company where we're building all of these big systems, many of which you can probably see in the background of the camera here. But the core of everything that we do is actually software.”
Schimpf: Anduril has 7,000 employees and is still doubling revenue past $1B
“So we're eight years ish in we're at about 7000 employees. We have consistently doubled revenue like every year, right? So even like over a billion, we're still doubling revenue.”
Schimpf: Anduril will produce autonomous fighter jets in months
“We're making autonomous fighter jets. You know, like three years ago, we weren't believable to make autonomous fighter jets. Now we're doing it. And we're going to have them be produced in a production facility in like months from now.”
Luckey: Fury is the US Air Force's first procured autonomous fighter
“This is the first autonomous fighter that the United States air force has ever procured.”
Luckey: Anduril operates as a defense product company, not a contractor
“We like to think of our approach as being a defense product company, not a defense contractor. That is, we're not getting paid to engage in contracted work where they say, go and do, you know, this many hours of work to build exactly this thing. Instead, we're…”
Luckey: Anduril took Fury to first flight in 556 days
“We went from signing a contract with the air force to first flight in 556 days. Which is, as far as I know, the fastest new fighter development program since the end of the Korean War.”
Clark: SpaceX, Tesla, and Anduril accelerated growth at multi-billion scale
“I was looking at the revenue curves actually of and roll and SpaceX and Tesla the other day, and they are some of the only companies that have actually accelerated growth at scale, which is to say they are growing at a faster rate at multi-billion dollar scale…”
Ulevitch: Defense tech companies need public marketing to win political support
“Andrel never loses sight of who their customer is, and they have a ton, like, you know, there's tons of, like, collateral and white papers and documentation for their customers, but at the same time, they're hugely dependent on support from Washington for the …”
Slattery: Nominal's early team surpassed engineering groups at SpaceX and Anduril
“Meeting the initial folks at Nominal, it was evident from those conversations that this team was above and beyond even those groups I had worked with at Andrel and at SpaceX, so that was extremely exciting.”
Moore: SpaceX, Anduril, OpenAI, and Anthropic could reach trillion-dollar valuations
“These companies that could be worth trillions of dollars someday. The SpaceX's, the Anduril's, the OpenAI's, the Anthropics.”
8VC partners initially feared office protests and reputational ruin for funding Anduril
“We literally had conversations internal at AVC with our partners where we were worried about our offices getting protested. And we gave a like small chance that, you know, actually maybe our reputation is completely ruined because at that time, everyone was ag…”
Successful defense tech startups are rarely founded by industry outsiders
“Most of these companies I mentioned that we invested in are started by people who were actually at one of these successful companies, Endural, Palantir, or SpaceX before, or who were in military service themselves, and they know sort of the landscape. It's ver…”
Monroe-Anderson: 2D cut aluminum plates are much cheaper than cast drone bodies
“And so that acts as a big heat sink, but we're still using, it's just a flat plate that's cut into a shape in two D versus having to be cast or CNC'd, which is just a lot cheaper for mass manufacturing.”
Harrison: Anduril started on day one where Palantir was in year 10
“Anduril on day one got to start where Palantir was in year 10. Like, that, that level of experience and knowledge that is the kind of, like, specialty that they had and resonated with”
Harrison: Anduril risks private capital on internal R&D instead of government funds
“Where the military, you know, where the military is trying to acquire things built to spec, the goal of Anduril is to acquire things built to mission, right, so they fund their own R&D, they put their own money up, rather than asking the government for R&D dol…”
Harrison: Anduril has nailed all five core concepts from its original pitch deck
“In their first pitch deck there, if I can remember all of them, they basically had five things, and they had all these weird ways to describe things like, you know, VR for war fighters and perimeter security on a stick and all these things that were, like, the…”
Harrison: Anduril is shifting from augmenting defense assets to replacing them
“And now increasingly, what is most impressive is that what started as very much a sort of, like, product suite of adjacencies of, like, these are all things that will augment a lot of existing assets. We're now getting into potentially, like, asset replacement…”
Harrison: Investors overlook defense supply chain opportunities chasing the next Anduril
“People are under-appreciating a lot of the, like, second and third order effects from, like, a supply chain perspective around defense, because they're so focused on, well, who's gonna be the next andurl, and it's like, you can make a lot of money investing in…”
Harrison: Autonomous aircraft like Fury extend pilot reach while eliminating pilot risk
“So like you look at, so Fury as an example, it's not only replacing in some cases, because there are some missions that we no longer need to send pilots into danger, we can do it autonomously, but there are some cases where you still want human judgment and sp…”
Harrison: Anduril has had products deployed in Ukraine since day one
“Palmer says that Anduril has had products on the ground in Ukraine basically since day one. They were over there pretty quickly, you know, deploying assets and stuff like that.”