Anduril aims at $60 billion valuation in new funding round

Palmer Luckey’s defense technology firm, Anduril, is currently engaged in a substantial funding round, targeting a valuation of $60 billion. This multi-billion-dollar endeavor is spearheaded by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. This funding effort follows closely on the heels of the company's Series G round, which concluded in June with an impressive $2.5 billion raised at a valuation of $30 billion. Additional participation is anticipated from Lux Capital and Founders Fund. According to a prior report from Bloomberg, this new investment round could potentially inject up to $8 billion into Anduril, which had just wrapped up its previous funding last summer. However, this fundraising comes at a challenging time for defense startups. Following a contract dispute involving Anthropic and the Pentagon, the U.S. government has begun the process of terminating all contracts with the AI firm, and Secretary of Defense Hegseth has hinted at designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk. Although Luckey has not explicitly supported the supply-chain-risk designation, he has expressed his agreement with the government’s position. In a recent post on X, he emphasized, "At the end of the day, you have to believe that our imperfect constitutional republic is still good enough to run a country without outsourcing the real levers of power to billionaires and corpos and their shadow advisors."