Anduril, the protection tech firm co-founded by Palmer Luckey, is contemplating constructing its first main manufacturing plant, a 5-million-square-foot facility generally known as “Arsenal-1,” in Arizona, Ohio or Texas, in response to somebody acquainted with the matter.
The firm, which is growing autonomous drones, planes, and submarines, had introduced $1.5 billion at a $14 billion post-money valuation in September.
In conjunction with that spherical, Anduril introduced it plans to make use of the recent capital for manufacturing, investing “hundreds of millions” to develop its Arsenal-1 facility. It additionally mentioned it might use the cash for hiring and promised that the power will make use of “thousands of people” and be able to producing “tens of thousands autonomous military systems annually.”
When TechCrunch requested an Anduril spokesperson if the corporate was now selecting between these three areas for its manufacturing facility, she responded “that is incorrect” however wouldn’t specify what precisely was incorrect.
Earlier this 12 months, the US Air Force selected Anduril to develop and take a look at small unmanned fighter jets. The firm beat out Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman for the deal, a major win for the seven-year-old VC-backed enterprise. (A surveillance plane firm, General Atomics, was additionally chosen as an awardee to modernize the Air Force fleet.)
Anduril is at present manufacturing its programs in Georgia, Mississippi, Rhode Island, and Australia, in response to its web site. While these areas are offering the corporate with “significant manufacturing capacity,” Anduril desires the brand new facility to turn into a prototype of a quicker, cheaper, software-defined manufacturing facility for constructing weapons, one which is ready to improve manufacturing quickly and nimbly.
This is in distinction to the type of typical bespoke protection and aerospace contractor manufacturing right this moment, which makes every half pricey to alter. Anduril isn’t the one VC-backed protection tech firm engaged on the manufacturing a part of the issue. As TechCrunch beforehand reported, a bunch of former Anduril engineers launched a startup referred to as Salient Motion, to do that for the aerospace trade and was promptly sued by Anduril. The go well with has since been settled. Others, like Ursa Major, are engaged on making rocket motors by 3D printing.
Although Anduril’s headquarters are in Costa Mesa, California, and can stay there, our supply says, the vast majority of the corporate’s employees will doubtless be primarily based at Arsenal-1. Arizona, Texas, and Ohio are all pretty frequent sense potential decisions, as all are states the place protection contractors and different varieties of manufacturing amenities abound.
Investors in Anduril’s final spherical embody Founders Fund, Sands Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, and Baillie Gifford.
