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

Palmer Luckey has come a good distance from hacking together virtual reality headsets in a storage. At this time, the Oculus VR founder’s protection tech startup, Anduril, introduced that it has raised $1.5 billion along with growing a brand new manufacturing platform to provide “tens of 1000’s of autonomous weapons” a yr.

The funding spherical, led by Founders Fund and Sands Capital, might assist the seven-year-old Anduril transition from a flashy protection trade upstart to a extra severe 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 artificial intelligence, and so they seek for methods to ramp up America’s capability to provide navy {hardware} to match that of a potential adversary corresponding to China.

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

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

Anduril says that Arsenal will observe the sort 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 observe and optimize manufacturing operations. The corporate says it’s going to additionally depend on a provide chain that’s extra resilient as a result of it’s going to supply elements primarily from the US or allied nations.

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