Palmer Luckey’s Protection Startup, Anduril, Raises $1.5 Billion to Produce AI-Powered Weapons

Palmer Luckey has come a good distance from hacking collectively digital actuality headsets in a storage. At present, the Oculus VR founder’s protection tech startup, Anduril, introduced that it has raised $1.5 billion along with creating a brand new manufacturing platform to supply “tens of hundreds of autonomous weapons” a yr.

The funding spherical, led by Founders Fund and Sands Capital, may assist the seven-year-old Anduril transition from a flashy protection trade upstart to a extra critical US protection contractor.

It additionally displays a shift in navy considering, as policymakers adapt to the prospect of battlefields dominated not solely by tanks and fighter jets, but in addition by drones and synthetic intelligence, and so they seek for methods to ramp up America’s capability to supply navy {hardware} to match that of a potential adversary resembling China.

As well as, Anduril is betting that it could actually parlay a lean and environment friendly tech trade strategy to manufacturing into a brand new manner of manufacturing weapons programs at scale. The corporate says it has developed an AI-powered manufacturing platform, known as Arsenal, to hurry up the manufacturing of its rising armory of drones and different {hardware}.

Greg Allen, an skilled on the Heart for Strategic and Worldwide Research, says the Pentagon is getting extra critical about working with nontraditional protection contractors and investing in small, low-cost, autonomous programs. “The celebrities are aligning by way of the [Department of Defense] altering its strategy, new firms coming with a unique strategy, and the enterprise capital neighborhood lastly keen to place large cash in danger to make issues change,” he says.

Anduril says that Arsenal will observe the type of strategy utilized in high-tech manufacturing by firms like Apple and Tesla. This implies designing merchandise with manufacturing in thoughts and utilizing software program to watch and optimize manufacturing operations. The corporate says it’ll additionally depend on a provide chain that’s extra resilient as a result of it’ll supply parts primarily from the US or allied nations.

The corporate says it’ll spend a number of hundred million {dollars} to construct the primary manufacturing facility of this sort, the glossy Arsenal-1, at an undisclosed location. Anduril has already ramped up its manufacturing capabilities in recent times, with a manufacturing facility in Mississippi for constructing strong rocket motors and one other in Rhode Island for producing drones.

Rendering of Anduril’s deliberate Arsenal-1 manufacturing facility.Anduril