Well, so much for the defense tech bubble popping.
This morning, defense tech giant Anduril announced that it’s raised a $5B—yes, billion with a B—Series H at a $61B valuation led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The round brings total funding raised by the megalith to over $11B over eight rounds.
“Investors have increasingly recognized the scale of the technological and industrial challenges facing the United States and its allies,” Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf wrote in a letter published alongside the raise. “This financing reflects that shift, and it gives us the ability to continue investing aggressively in manufacturing capacity, research and development, and the infrastructure required to build and field advanced defense systems at scale.”
The raise came in about $1B higher than expected—a $4B raise at a $60B valuation was first rumored earlier this spring.
The round is one of the biggest of the year to date, exceeded only by OpenAI ($122B), xAI ($20B), and Waymo ($16B). Decent company, we’d say.
Speed run: Now, Anduril needs no introduction around here.
The company has been building autonomous weapons since before it was the cool, hip thing to do (like, since 2017), and has grown into a massively funded empire building all things zoom and boom.
Anduril has scored billions (yeah, again, with a B) in contracts with the US military, including:
- An enterprise agreement with the Army worth up to $20B
- An IDIQ worth up to $950M for the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System
- $159M for the Army’s Soldier Borne Mission Command (SBMC) program
- A $99.6 million OTA to build a prototype for the Army’s next-generation command and control program (NGC2)
- Over $43.7M in DPA funding and a $19M Navy contract to build solid rocket motors.
- They also won a contract with the US Army to “develop a Battle Manager prototype” for missile defense in the Western Pacific yesterday.
Anduril is also leading one of the prototype teams for the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program, and its Dive XL autonomous sub has been tapped by the US Navy and DIU for the XL-AUV program. A similar sub is also on a program of record with the Australian Navy.
In the arsenal: Plus, they’re investing a heck-ton of money in building the production capacity and infrastructure to, like, actually build this stuff.
- Last January, they announced that they’d be investing $1B in a 5M+ square foot mega factory of the future called Arsenal-1 in Ohio.
- The first bits of that factory (Building 1) are up and running, reportedly churning out the YFQ-44A wingman for the CCA program.
- The company says Arsenal-1 will ultimately employ 4,000 people within the decade and bring $2B in projected annual economic output.
- In January, the company also announced that it would be expanding into a new 1M+ square-foot campus in Long Beach, CA, that will employ about 6,000 people.
- At a rough estimate, the company’s got about 20 production facilities at present—with more to come.
More, more, more: An Anduril spokesperson told Tectonic that most of this latest round will fund this continued buildup—plus a bunch of R&D.
- This pile of cash—a sum larger than the GDPs of about 75 countries, fun fact—means the company can keep building out production facilities, hiring more engineers, and doing things like investing in suppliers and supply chain ahead of time.
- The spokesperson said the company would be bringing in lots of new machinery, infrastructure, and equipment to bring production from low to high-rate.
- A big portion of the cash money will go to hiring—the company is currently at about 8500 employees and plans to hire thousands more for those new facilities, with an emphasis on engineers.
- A big emphasis here is also on R&D—the funding, the spokesperson added, will allow the company to explore and develop new and innovative products for the military. (About 50-60% of the company’s revenue is spent on R&D, they added.)
- This year (2026) will be focused mainly on production—next year is when we can expect those new, flashy products to start rolling out. The spokesperson said that some of these could be larger and more complex than things like the CCA or Dive XL—these literal billions of dollars will help fund that.
Out in public: Now, if you remember kindergarten, H is like, pretty far down the alphabet.
We asked the spokesperson whether this latest round had gotten Anduril any closer to that long-rumored IPO—or had changed the company’s thinking on the whole public markets thing.
They told Tectonic that the goal remains to IPO—but that a listing is not imminent.
- The business as a whole needs to be profitable (or close to it) first—currently, some business lines are, but not the whole shebang. FWIW: Anduril’s revenue hit $2.2B in 2025, according to a letter to investors by Schimpf.
- It’s also about timing, and whether the IPO market is favorable, they added.
- Right now, the spokesperson said, there are a lot of venture dollars available to Anduril (this round, like all of their rounds, was oversubscribed), so that’s how they’re choosing to fund their expansion.
“Withstanding techno-military competition will require rapid means to reconstitute combat power in short periods of time,” Schimpf wrote in that investor letter back in January. “As we look to the coming year, we remain focused on delivering the arsenal that keeps the United States and its allies out of the fight by preparing for it.”
This article has been updated to reflect that Anduril has raised over $11B across eight rounds.