Anduril, the defense technology company co-founded by Palmer Lackey, plans to build its first major manufacturing facility in Arizona, Ohio or Texas, a 5 million square foot facility known as Arsenal-1. Officials said they are considering it. On that matter.
The company, which develops autonomous drones, planes and submarines, announced a $1.5 billion investment in September at a post-money valuation of $14 billion.
In connection with this round, Anduril announced plans to use the new capital for manufacturing and invest “hundreds of millions of dollars” in the development of its Arsenal-1 facility. He also said the money would be used for jobs, promising that the facility would employ “thousands of people” and be able to produce “tens of thousands of autonomous military systems a year.”
When TechCrunch asked an Anduril spokesperson if the company was choosing one of these three locations for its factory, she said, “That's wrong,” but didn't specify specifically. He did not say what had gone wrong.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Air Force selected Anduril to develop and test small unmanned combat vehicles. The company beat out Boeing Co., Lockheed Martin Corp. and Northrop Grumman Corp. for the deal, a major win for the seven-year-old venture capital-backed business. (Surveillance aircraft company General Atomics was also selected as an award recipient for the purpose of modernizing the Air Force fleet.)
Anduril currently manufactures systems in Georgia, Mississippi, Rhode Island and Australia, according to the company's website. While these locations provide the company with “significant manufacturing capacity,” Anduril said the new facility is a prototype for a faster, cheaper, software-defined weapons manufacturing factory that can quickly and nimbly ramp up production. I hope it will become.
This is in contrast to today's typical defense and aerospace contractor custom manufacturing, where changing each part is costly. Anduril isn't the only venture capital-backed defense technology company tackling the manufacturing part of the problem. As TechCrunch previously reported, a group of former Anduril engineers started a startup called Salient Motion to do this for the aerospace industry, and it was quickly sued by Anduril. The lawsuit was later settled. Companies like Ursa Major are working to manufacture rocket motors through 3D printing.
Anduril's headquarters are in Costa Mesa, California, and will remain there, but sources say the majority of the company's staff will likely be based at Arsenal-1. Arizona, Texas, and Ohio are all states that are rich in defense contractors and other types of manufacturing facilities, so they're pretty common sense choices.
Anduril's final round of investors included Founders Fund, Sands Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, and Baillie Gifford.