Anduril: CEO History

Anduril is the defense company Silicon Valley built on purpose. Founded in 2017 by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey and four colleagues, most of them from Palantir, it sells autonomous aircraft, interceptors, undersea vehicles and surveillance towers, all tied together by its Lattice software. The commercial logic is what separates it from Lockheed Martin or Boeing: Anduril spends its own money to build a product and then sells it at a fixed price, so the customer buys something that already flies. Nine years in, it is building combat aircraft for the US Air Force, undersea vehicles for the Royal Australian Navy and counter-drone systems for US Special Operations Command. The company is headquartered in Costa Mesa, California.

Anduril funds development with private capital and then sells finished systems at firm fixed prices, the reverse of the cost-plus contracts that pay the established primes for research hours. Lattice is the tie that binds the catalog: sentry towers, drones, interceptors and undersea vehicles feed sensor data into it, the software is licensed on recurring agreements, and fielded systems keep receiving updates. Anduril also sells capability as a service, running base and perimeter defense under multi-year agreements, and takes prime integration roles such as the US Special Operations Command counter-drone contract. In March 2026 the US Army set up a commercial ordering vehicle with a $20 billion ceiling that lets federal buyers purchase Anduril products directly, and issued the first task order under it for counter-drone work.