Anduril Industries announced it has secured $1.5 billion of funding for its Series F round to hyperscale defense manufacturing. This funding will enable Anduril to increase hiring, enhance processes, upgrade tooling, increase resiliency in its supply chain and expand infrastructure. Anduril is also investing in Arsenal, the manufacturing platform for modern warfare. With Arsenal, Anduril’s goal is to manufacture and produce tens of thousands of autonomous weapons systems addressing the urgent needs of the United States and allies. Co-led by Founders Fund and Sands Capital, Anduril’s Series F values the company at $14 billion and includes new investors Fidelity Management & Research Company, Counterpoint Global, and Baillie Gifford, as well as major commitments from existing investors including Altimeter and Franklin Venture Partners.
As the United States and our allies attempt to gain affordable mass with autonomous systems, weapons, and munitions, the defense industrial base must be capable of producing orders of magnitude more than it is currently producing today. To support that effort, Anduril is investing our own dollars to hyperscale weapons manufacturing using the same agile, rapid, and scalable processes found in the commercial manufacturing sector. The conflict in Ukraine has exposed a critical vulnerability in the United States’ ability to respond to crisis. In a major conflict, use of weapons and munitions would quickly exceed supply — it is projected that the United States would run out of weapons in the first few weeks. At the same time, the traditional defense industrial base has faced significant challenges in scaling production to meet demands. Slow and low production rates, inflexible processes and the development of exquisite, defense-specific, bespoke systems have hindered the ability to respond quickly to need. Lead times to replenish key weapons and munitions average two years.
Arsenal is a software-defined manufacturing platform that is optimized for the mass production of autonomous systems and weapons. To achieve hyperscale, the arsenal platform leverages four principles: design for simplicity and scale, resilient supply chain, software-defined production, and central infrastructure – a factory called Arsenal-1. Arsenal dismantles the traditional defense production preference for complexity by designing products that are as simple as possible, eliminating unnecessary materials, parts, and specialized processes. In addition, the Arsenal design leverages a nonlinear approach to production, driven by modular and flexible design decisions. Arsenal integrates a commercial supply chain wherever possible, a strategy that brings efficiency and agility to defense production. Nearly 90 percent of Anduril’s products can be developed and manufactured at hyperscale using commercially available components and materials. Access to this diverse and reliable pool of components reduces lead times and production costs.
The Arsenal platform is software-defined, and the software serves as a unified system to integrate the design, development, and mass production stages for all Anduril products. Arsenal consists of a common enterprise resource planning system and a proprietary manufacturing execution software system to integrate threat-based operational analysis, modeling, simulation, drawing, testing, bill of materials management, work orders, production, and data management across the product lifecycle. To join the existing family of factories, Anduril is investing hundreds of millions in the development of Arsenal-1. Upon completion, Arsenal-1 will be more than five million square feet of production space that will employ thousands of people and is designed to produce tens of thousands of autonomous military systems annually. Arsenal-1 provides maximum flexibility to reallocate the most critical manufacturing resources — people, capital, machines, and materials — to meet new requirements, launch new products, or scale production to meet surges in demand, indefinitely. This is simply not possible when those critical resources are spread out across multiple, distributed geographic areas.
Anduril’s commitment to agile, responsive manufacturing has already been demonstrated globally. Most recently, Anduril announced a $75 million investment to increase manufacturing and production capacity for solid rocket motors in Mississippi. In addition, Anduril also announced the opening of its Rhode Island production facility to enable Anduril to increase production to 200 AUVs per year. This complements our existing network of current factories in California and Georgia as well as our Ghost Shark factory in Australia. Consistent with Anduril’s broader approach, Anduril is taking on the risk of developing Arsenal by using its own dollars to invest in people, process, tooling, supply chain resiliency, and infrastructure. Anduril is committed to transforming US and allied defense capabilities by combining modern software expertise with a rapid and differentiated approach to hardware development and manufacturing. From cutting-edge counter drone systems to extra-large autonomous underwater vehicles, Anduril has proven it can deliver highly-performant, next-generation, software-defined capabilities on a timeline and scale that matters.
