Inside Anduril: The $31 Billion Defense Startup Trying to Out-Engineer Lockheed

Anduril Industries, the defense tech startup founded in 2017, has quietly become one of the most consequential weapons companies in America — and its operational center of gravity isn't founder Palmer Luckey, but rather CEO Brian Schimpf, a 42-year-old Cornell-educated engineer and self-described Democrat who fundraised for Joe Biden. Schimpf recently handed a Fortune reporter a three-pound tungsten warhead at Anduril's secretive West Texas test site, where the company demos its Bolt drone — a munitions-carrying system built on a $23.9 million Marine Corps contract — diving at 85-degree angles toward distant hills obscured from photographers to prevent intelligence analysts from identifying the location.

Anduril's accomplishments in under a decade are startling for a startup. Its Lattice software platform — which gives military operators a unified, AI-powered picture of the battlefield — is set to become the backbone of nearly every major U.S. counter-drone program. Its Ghost Shark autonomous submarine is under long-term contract with the Royal Australian Navy. In 2024, Anduril beat Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman to help develop the Air Force's Collaborative Combat Aircraft program. And in March 2025, it won its largest contract yet: up to $20 billion over 10 years with the U.S. Army. The company is currently valued at $31 billion and eyeing an even higher valuation in a forthcoming fundraise.

The company's founding story is more complicated than the Palmer Luckey legend. Luckey — the Hawaiian-shirt-wearing Oculus creator fired from Facebook in 2017 over his Trump support — is the public face, but he freely admits Schimpf is the real story. Schimpf spent a decade at Palantir before co-founding Anduril, building classified systems he still can't fully discuss. When the co-founders assembled, Grimm, Luckey, and Stephens all deferred to Schimpf for the CEO role immediately. As Luckey put it bluntly: 'It was always: It's fucking Brian.' Schimpf's first product, autonomous solar-powered Sentry surveillance towers, now monitors the U.S.-Mexico border for Customs and Border Protection using AI, radar, and computer vision.

Schimpf's vision for Anduril is explicitly about speed and engineering culture over bureaucratic process. He describes running the company 'two clicks more chaotic and disorganized than any sane person would think,' arguing that controlled chaos sustains innovation. Headcount has doubled annually and now exceeds 8,000 employees. Stanford defense innovation expert Steve Blank compares Anduril to Boeing in the 1960s and '70s, before finance executives displaced engineers at the helm. Schimpf's target competitors — Lockheed and RTX — have market caps above $100 billion and decades of Washington relationships Anduril is still building. His stated ambition: a trillion-dollar company, if things go 'some version of the way we think.'

The risks are real and openly acknowledged. Anduril's finances are heavily concentrated in a small number of contracts, a fact Schimpf disclosed candidly to his own engineers at a company AMA. The factories it's building could take decades to pay off, test sites cost millions before a single missile flies, and the company is not yet profitable. Meanwhile, the ongoing war in Iran — where Anduril's air defense systems are deployed alongside legacy defense giants' equipment — has exposed what Schimpf calls a dangerous shortage in U.S. munitions stockpiles: 'War is inherently industrial in the modern era, and we are not prepared for that.' Schimpf's defining tension is the one he keeps returning to — how to move fast enough to matter without becoming the slow, finance-captured institution he set out to disrupt. As he puts it: 'The question isn't whether we can build the next Lockheed Martin. It's whether we can avoid becoming the thing we're trying to replace.'