Anduril, the defense tech company co-founded by Palmer Luckey, is considering building its first major manufacturing plant, a 5-million-square-foot facility known as “Arsenal-1,” in Arizona, Ohio or Texas, according to someone familiar with the matter.
The company, which is developing autonomous drones, planes, and submarines, had announced $1.5 billion at a $14 billion post-money valuation in September.
In conjunction with that round, Anduril announced it plans to use the fresh capital for manufacturing, investing “hundreds of millions” to develop its Arsenal-1 facility. It also said it would use the money for hiring and promised that the facility will employ “thousands of people” and be capable of producing “tens of thousands autonomous military systems annually.”
When TechCrunch asked an Anduril spokesperson if the company was now choosing between these three locations for its factory, she responded “that is incorrect” but would not specify what exactly was incorrect.
Earlier this year, the US Air Force chose Anduril to develop and test small unmanned fighter jets. The company beat out Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman for the deal, a significant win for the seven-year-old VC-backed business. (A surveillance aircraft company, General Atomics, was also selected as an awardee to modernize the Air Force fleet.)
Anduril is currently manufacturing its systems in Georgia, Mississippi, Rhode Island, and Australia, according to its website. While these locations are providing the company with “significant manufacturing capacity,” Anduril wants the new facility to become a prototype of a faster, cheaper, software-defined factory for building weapons, one that is able to increase production rapidly and nimbly.
This is in contrast to the kind of typical bespoke defense and aerospace contractor manufacturing today, which makes each part costly to change. Anduril is not the only VC-backed defense tech company working on the manufacturing part of the problem. As TechCrunch previously reported, a group of former Anduril engineers launched a startup called Salient Motion, to do this for the aerospace industry and was promptly sued by Anduril. The suit has since been settled. Others, like Ursa Major, are working on making rocket motors through 3D printing.
Although Anduril’s headquarters are in Costa Mesa, California, and will remain there, our source says, the majority of the company’s staff will likely be based at Arsenal-1. Arizona, Texas, and Ohio are all fairly common sense potential choices, as all are states where defense contractors and other types of manufacturing facilities abound.
Investors in Anduril’s last round include Founders Fund, Sands Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, and Baillie Gifford.