Palmer Luckey has come a good distance from hacking collectively digital actuality headsets in a storage. Right this moment, the Oculus VR founder’s protection tech startup, Anduril, introduced that it has raised $1.5 billion along with growing 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, may assist the seven-year-old Anduril transition from a flashy protection business upstart to a extra severe US protection contractor.
It additionally displays a shift in army considering, as policymakers adapt to the prospect of battlefields dominated not solely by tanks and fighter jets, but in addition by drones and synthetic intelligence, and so they seek for methods to ramp up America’s capability to provide army {hardware} to match that of a potential adversary resembling China.
As well as, Anduril is betting that it might probably parlay a lean and environment friendly tech business method to manufacturing into a brand new approach of manufacturing weapons techniques at scale. The corporate says it has developed an AI-powered manufacturing platform, known as Arsenal, to hurry up the manufacturing of its rising armory of drones and different {hardware}.
Greg Allen, an knowledgeable on the Heart 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 techniques. “The celebs are aligning by way of the [Department of Defense] altering its method, new firms coming with a distinct method, and the enterprise capital neighborhood lastly keen to place large cash in danger to make issues change,” he says.
Anduril says that Arsenal will comply with the form of method utilized in high-tech manufacturing by firms like Apple and Tesla. This implies designing merchandise with manufacturing in thoughts and utilizing software program to observe 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 elements primarily from the US or allied nations.
The corporate says it would spend a number of hundred million {dollars} to construct the primary manufacturing facility of this sort, the glossy Arsenal-1, at an undisclosed location. Anduril has already ramped up its manufacturing capabilities lately, with a manufacturing facility in Mississippi for constructing stable rocket motors and one other in Rhode Island for producing drones.
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Rendering of Anduril’s deliberate Arsenal-1 manufacturing facility.Anduril
