Palmer Luckey has come a good distance from hacking collectively digital actuality 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 1000’s 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 business 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 synthetic intelligence, they usually seek for methods to ramp up America’s capability to provide navy {hardware} to match that of a potential adversary comparable to China.
As well as, Anduril is betting that it will 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, referred to as Arsenal, to hurry up the manufacturing of its rising armory of drones and different {hardware}.
Greg Allen, an skilled 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 celebrities are aligning when it comes to the [Department of Defense] altering its method, new corporations coming with a unique method, and the enterprise capital neighborhood lastly keen to place massive cash in danger to make issues change,” he says.
Anduril says that Arsenal will observe the type of method utilized in high-tech manufacturing by corporations 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 can additionally depend on a provide chain that’s extra resilient as a result of it can supply parts primarily from the US or allied nations.
The corporate says it can spend a number of hundred million {dollars} to construct the primary manufacturing unit of this sort, the smooth Arsenal-1, at an undisclosed location. Anduril has already ramped up its manufacturing capabilities lately, with a manufacturing unit 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 unit.Anduril