Anduril Industries is a US defense-technology company founded in 2017 by a group that included Palmer Luckey, the creator of the Oculus virtual-reality headset, and Brian Schimpf, who has served as chief executive since the start. The company set out to challenge the traditional defense industry by building modern software and autonomous hardware and selling finished products to the military, rather than developing them slowly under cost-plus government contracts.
In a firsthand interview, Schimpf described the founding idea simply: “we thought there was a better way to make defense technology.” He has framed the company’s bet as a shift toward “more cheap, autonomous systems on the battlefield” rather than small numbers of expensive, exquisite platforms. The company’s central product is Lattice, a software platform that fuses data from many sensors and systems into a single command-and-control picture. Schimpf has argued that the real constraint in modern warfare is data overload, asking “what the hell are you going to do with the data,” and positioning AI mainly as a way to scale operations and help human operators rather than to replace their judgment.
Anduril builds a range of autonomous systems including drones, counter-drone systems, surveillance towers, and underwater vehicles, all designed to plug into Lattice. By the mid-2020s it had grown into one of the most prominent and highly valued defense-tech startups, often cited alongside the US military’s push toward large numbers of attritable autonomous systems.
For a general reader, Anduril is the clearest example of Silicon Valley’s move into defense. Its software-first, build-and-sell model and its emphasis on cheap autonomy embody a broader shift in how militaries plan to use AI, and it sits at the center of debates about how much autonomy should be entrusted to machines on the battlefield.