Rebuilding the DC-Silicon Valley Bridge: The Origins of our Conviction in Anduril

Our partnership with Anduril is rooted in a shared conviction that the future of global defense demands a radical shift: away from traditional defense procurement and toward a product-first, software-fueled model.

In 2017, when we first supported Anduril’s seed round, this conviction was far from conventional wisdom. The consensus among VCs, as we understood it, was that defense was a complex, slow-moving market dominated by entrenched players. But to us, there was an opportunity for the right team to redefine the industry.

“What drew us to Anduril from day one wasn’t a certainty that they would win, but admiration for the audacity of their ambition. They were reimagining how software and AI could transform national security long before others believed such a transformation was possible.” - Hemant Taneja

Anduril’s founders realized that the U.S. had fallen behind on the technology adoption curve. As we've written about before, procurement cycles had become long, complicated, and onerous. On top of this, we observed the largest defense contractors lacking the ability to recruit the best technical talent. Reinvigorating the defense innovation flywheel for the 21st century would require an entirely new kind of defense company.

Anduril’s Transformative Approach

When we first met the Anduril team, the irony was not lost on us: while Silicon Valley was originally built on partnerships with the national security community, recent innovations in technology had barely touched the defense industry. We knew that the U.S. military had a pressing need for modernization driven by innovations in both hardware and software. As early as 2004, we had invested in companies seeking to inject technology into the national security landscape, including defense tech R&D innovator BBN and geospatial analytics and intelligence company OGSystems.

We believed from the start that Anduril had the potential to become a new kind of defense prime, one that would innovate at the speed of technology. Anduril set out to reverse the transformation story between Silicon Valley and the Department of Defense: its ambitious vision was to leverage innovations in consumer technologies to redefine deterrence in an era of advanced computing, ubiquitous sensors, and autonomous software-defined systems.

In our view, Anduril was a one-of-a-kind company, with a founding team that blended expertise across deep tech, defense, and software engineering. Founder Palmer Luckey had already successfully scaled and exited his first startup, a virtual reality headset display acquired by Meta (then known as Facebook). Three co-founders (Brian Schimpf, Trae Stephens, and Matt Grimm) had spent their careers at Palantir, where they wrestled with ethical dilemmas about building products for military use. They knew that the next generation of defense technology would be systems defined by software. And they understood the challenge of attracting the very best software engineers to build these new systems.

That’s why they designed a mission underpinned by a transparent ethical framework, which helped cultivate a new category of AI and ML engineers. These professionals were eager to apply their skills to the U.S. government’s hardest problems, recognizing that these challenges could only be solved through great engineering. 

“The United States needs to be focusing on the technologies that are going to win the next wars, not the ones that won the last wars.” - Palmer Luckey

Inspired by Anduril’s clarity of vision and our knowledge of the critical technology gap in defense, we joined Founders Fund as one of the earliest institutional investors to support Anduril’s seed round.

The Timeline

Our Conviction in Action: Defense Innovation at the Speed of Technology

Not only has Anduril’s foundational mission proven to be prescient, it sparked our own reevaluation of what responsible innovation means in an increasingly unstable world. It became clear to us that traditional defense procurement couldn’t keep up with evolving global threats. Supporting a more secure, more prosperous world would require new ways of backing innovative companies driving deterrence. This realization led to our creation of the GC Responsible Defense and Risk Committee, which now advises responsible innovation meant to maintain our strategic advantage by rapidly integrating advanced software and AI into our defense capabilities.

"Anduril is proof that a product-first, software-defined approach can deliver mission-critical defense capabilities at a pace the traditional defense-industrial base couldn’t.” – Paul Kwan

Anduril embodies this approach by developing cutting-edge software and AI platforms and bringing products to market in months rather than years. At the core of their operations is Lattice OS, an AI-powered platform that gathers and makes sense of sensor data from cameras, infrared sensors, radars, drones, and more. Lattice then feeds this information into a unified command and control center that operates modularly across Anduril’s family of systems. By building a scalable and adaptable software core, Anduril is not only able to provide cutting-edge technological capabilities to its government partners, it’s able to do so at the speed of the most innovative technology companies.



“Lattice is our core foundational software platform that enables us to connect all the sensors on a battlefield.” - Brian Schimpf

Within two years of launching, Anduril was already deploying its Lattice system across roughly a dozen contracts with federal agencies. A successful pilot deploying its Sentry Tower system on the southern U.S. border led to Anduril’s first program of record. That system alone now brings continuous and autonomous surveillance to borders, military bases, oil and gas pipelines, airports, nuclear power facilities, and other critical infrastructure.


We believe this early success was a testament to Anduril’s ability to outpace and outperform traditional hardware-first defense models. More wins have followed, including counter-unmanned aircraft systems contracts for Special Operations Command and the U.S. Marine Corps as well as the takeover of the U.S. Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System, a massive augmented-reality headset initiative.


Now, with strategic acquisitions and investments in manufacturing facilities like Arsenal-1, Anduril is committed to onshoring and scaling advanced, technology-forward defense manufacturing. And with global partnerships including the Australian Defence Force and the UK Ministry of Defence, this commitment extends beyond the U.S. to our allies and partners.

Today, Anduril represents even more than what we thought was possible when we invested in their seed round in 2017: a defense company that operates at the speed of software to redefine national security innovation. What was true then, as now, is our belief in founders who are committed to modernizing our defense and global security capabilities with software-defined products and systems.