Palmer Luckey’s Protection Startup, Anduril, Raises $1.5 Billion to Produce AI-Powered Weapons

Palmer Luckey has come a good distance from hacking together virtual reality headsets in a storage. At present, the Oculus VR founder’s protection tech startup, Anduril, introduced that it has raised $1.5 billion along with creating a brand new manufacturing platform to provide “tens of hundreds of autonomous weapons” a yr.

The funding spherical, led by Founders Fund and Sands Capital, might assist the seven-year-old Anduril transition from a flashy protection trade upstart to a extra severe US protection contractor.

It additionally displays a shift in navy pondering, as policymakers adapt to the prospect of battlefields dominated not solely by tanks and fighter jets, but in addition by drones and artificial intelligence, and so they seek for methods to ramp up America’s capability to provide navy {hardware} to match that of a potential adversary corresponding to China.

As well as, Anduril is betting that it could parlay a lean and environment friendly tech trade strategy to manufacturing into a brand new manner of manufacturing weapons programs at scale. The corporate says it has developed an AI-powered manufacturing platform, referred to as Arsenal, to hurry up the manufacturing of its rising armory of drones and different {hardware}.

Greg Allen, an skilled on the Middle for Strategic and Worldwide Research, says the Pentagon is getting extra severe about working with nontraditional protection contractors and investing in small, low cost, autonomous programs. “The celebrities are aligning by way of the [Department of Defense] altering its strategy, new corporations coming with a special strategy, and the enterprise capital group lastly keen to place massive cash in danger to make issues change,” he says.

Anduril says that Arsenal will observe the sort of strategy utilized in high-tech manufacturing by corporations like Apple and Tesla. This implies designing merchandise with manufacturing in thoughts and utilizing software program to watch and optimize manufacturing operations. The corporate says it would additionally depend on a provide chain that’s extra resilient as a result of it would supply parts primarily from the US or allied nations.

The corporate says it would spend a number of hundred million {dollars} to construct the primary manufacturing unit of this sort, the modern Arsenal-1, at an undisclosed location. Anduril has already ramped up its manufacturing capabilities in recent times, with a manufacturing unit in Mississippi for constructing strong rocket motors and one other in Rhode Island for producing drones.