Who Founded Anduril?

Palmer Luckey is a co-founder of Anduril Industries and its best known hardware voice. He left Facebook in March 2017 and started Anduril weeks later, arguing that the Pentagon was buying from too few, too slow suppliers while leading technology firms refused military work. At Anduril he works on hardware architecture and has fronted launches including the Roadrunner interceptor in December 2023 and the EagleEye mixed-reality helmet in October 2025, a product that returned him to the headset engineering he started with. Palmer Luckey was born in 1992.

Brian Schimpf is a co-founder and the chief executive of Anduril Industries. Before starting the company in 2017 with Palmer Luckey and Trae Stephens, he was a director of engineering at Palantir Technologies, leading deployments of data integration software to war zones. As chief executive he has kept development privately funded and priced products as finished goods, the model behind Anduril's US Air Force collaborative combat aircraft work, its counter-drone contract with US Special Operations Command and the Ghost Shark program in Australia. He also approved the move into hyperscale manufacturing at Arsenal-1 in Ohio. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).

Trae Stephens is a co-founder and executive chairman of Anduril Industries and a partner at Founders Fund. He and Palmer Luckey started the company in 2017 on the view that the defense industrial base rewarded slow cost-plus programs over fast iteration. Stephens handles strategy, Washington relationships and capital formation: Founders Fund led Anduril's early rounds and later the $2.5 billion round of June 2025 that valued the company at $30.5 billion. He announced that round publicly on behalf of the company.

Trae Stephens was born in 1983. Education: Walsh School of Foreign Service.

Matt Grimm is a co-founder and the chief operating officer of Anduril Industries, responsible for operations, supply chain and facilities. He joined Palmer Luckey, Trae Stephens and Brian Schimpf in 2017 and has spent the years since turning engineering output into delivered hardware: sentry towers for Customs and Border Protection, interceptors and drones for US and allied forces, and the manufacturing build-out that runs from Costa Mesa to Arsenal-1 in Ohio and the Ghost Shark factory in Sydney. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).

Joe Chen is a co-founder of Anduril Industries and one of two founders who came from Oculus VR rather than Palantir. His work sits on the hardware side of the company, the sensors, optics and airframes that feed the Lattice software, and reflects the early Oculus practice of building and testing quickly with commercial parts. He co-founded the company in 2017 with Palmer Luckey, Brian Schimpf, Trae Stephens and Matt Grimm. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).