Anduril in 2023: A year in review

Anduril was founded in 2017 with the lofty goal of becoming not only the next major defense prime, but one that operated on the principles of speed, innovation, and disruption of the status quo. At the time, we found the long-revered and feared capabilities of the U.S. armed forces that were once the inspiration for science fiction had been leapfrogged by innovations in commercial technology. The ingenuity of incumbent defense primes had stagnated amid misaligned incentives and crippling bureaucratic procedures. Yet we understood that software would be at the core of weapons systems of the future. And what we fundamentally believed then is now widely acknowledged today: Only superior military technology can credibly deter war.

Much has changed since those early days when we started the company. Our geopolitical competitors seized the moment and exposed vulnerabilities in U.S. deterrence infrastructure. What was once deemed implausible has become reality: Russia's invasion of Ukraine now stands as one of the largest and most devastating land conflicts in Europe since the Second World War. In October, Hamas carried out one of the worst terrorist attacks in our lifetimes against the Israeli people, shifting regional instability to full-scale conflict. Meanwhile, China continues to saber rattle for forceful reunification with Taiwan by 2027 — a prospect that would result in disastrous geopolitical and economic ramifications for the world.

We are fortunate to be writing history rather than letting it pass us by. The systems we are building each and every day are helping to save lives and provide our customers with the means to defend themselves. And as we continue to build and grow, we can rest easy knowing that these efforts help safeguard our future from determined adversaries and strengthen our ability to deter great power conflict.

Anduril products are indeed deployed and making a difference for customers around the world right now: Sentry Towers are maintaining persistent situational awareness of military bases and numerous national and maritime borders. Anvil and Roadrunner stand ready to defeat adversary drones in austere locations. Ghost-X and ALTIUS launched effects now fly over the battlefields of Ukraine. And our Lattice command and control software is now in use by every branch of the U.S. military along with many allies and partners.

There is no better validation of the work that we do than seeing the trust our customers place in Anduril and our products. And that trust is all due to the tireless efforts of our incredible Anduril team. What we achieved this year is thanks to the dedication and hard work of more than 2,400+ Andurilians all around the world. We are profoundly grateful for their sacrifices, the relentless effort they have put in, and the unmatched innovations they had a hand in delivering.

The snapshot below provides a good summary of what we accomplished in 2023. This represents only a fraction of everything our talented team has built this year, but we hope it provides a sense of the remarkable impact of Anduril’s work. Thank you to everyone who made this another successful year for Anduril — employees, investors, partners, supporters, and so many others. We wish you all a restful and restorative holiday season!

New People, Places, and Company Growth

We had another remarkable year of growth at Anduril. We onboarded more than 1,000 new teammates to grow our team to more than 2,400 people across locations in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and other areas of the world. Some of this growth came through acquisitions: In June, we completed our acquisition of solid rocket motor supplier, Adranos, which is now our Rocket Motor Systems division. In September, we acquired Blue Force Technologies, a developer of autonomous aircraft with an integrated aerostructures division serving a wide range of defense and commercial customers. These deals expanded our footprint to Mississippi, Indiana, and North Carolina. Meanwhile, we expanded our facilities at our Headquarters in Costa Mesa, California, with the opening of a new 190,000 square-foot manufacturing and research and development facility.

Additionally, we hosted another amazing class of about 100 interns from schools around the nation. We also brought on retired Army Lt. Gen. Neil Thurgood as senior strategy advisor; Richard Drake to lead our efforts in the United Kingdom; and Keith Flynn to oversee and scale our manufacturing operations as Anduril’s first Senior Vice President of Manufacturing.

New Products

As always, we upgraded many of our existing products with new or enhanced capabilities and pushed those updates directly to warfighters. And we launched several exciting new products, including:

• Lattice for Mission Autonomy: A hardware-agnostic, end-to-end software platform that allows humans to employ autonomous systems in a way they never have before. This end-to-end software platform enables teams of diverse robotic assets to work together under human supervision to dynamically perform complex missions in any domain, extending reach, capabilities and situational awareness while enabling warfighters to make better decisions, faster.
• Ghost-X: The newest and most capable variant of our Ghost autonomous aircraft, Ghost-X increases payload capacity and enhanced flight performance while allowing for advanced options such as long-range resilient communications, vision-based navigation, and alternate gimbals.
• Anvil-M: A new explosive munitions variant of our autonomous Anvil interceptor drone that can effectively intercept and defeat threats from Group 1 and Group 2 unmanned aircraft systems.
• Fury: A Group 5 autonomous air vehicle with fighter-like performance. Our acquisition of Blue Force Technologies expanded our existing fleet of autonomous assets to include large, high-performance aircraft such as Fury. Fury leverages proprietary rapid prototyping, digital engineering, and an open architecture to deliver next-generation flight performance with the flexibility to integrate heterogenous sensors and payloads to support air dominance missions.
• Roadrunner: A modular, twin-jet powered autonomous air vehicle with vertical takeoff-and-landing capability that can be customized for a variety of missions.
• Roadrunner-M: Defining a radical new class of recoverable ground-based air defense capability, Roadrunner-M is a high-explosive variant of Roadrunner that can rapidly identify, intercept, and destroy aerial threats that are up to 100 times more expensive, or be recovered and reused at near-zero cost.

New Partners

It’s not possible to list all our new partners due to customer sensitivities, but here are a few we can highlight:

• Hadrian: We entered into a strategic partnership with Hadrian, a leader in advanced manufacturing, to supply and manufacture precision parts for Anduril’s suite of autonomous systems.
• Aalyria: We signed a teaming agreement with Aalyria to integrate key technologies that will advance joint all-domain command and control. The agreement facilitated integration of Aalyria’s networking orchestration platform, Spacetime, with Anduril’s open operating system for national security capabilities, Lattice.
• GM Defense: We entered into a teaming agreement with GM Defense, a subsidiary of General Motors, to collaborate on defense program capture activities. These include delivering autonomy solutions, battery electrification, and other new propulsion technologies, as well as those integrating the full range of Anduril technologies onto GM Defense mobility solutions.
• NOWRDC: We entered into a partnership with the National Offshore Wind Research and Development Consortium (NOWRDC) to autonomously inspect undersea power infrastructure.
• Epirus: We partnered with Epirus to integrate Leonidas, a high-power microwave counter-swarm defeat capability, into Anduril’s Lattice software. This integration provided new defeat capability for Anduril’s family of systems to better counter unmanned threats.

Demonstrations and Events

We hosted countless demonstrations and events for government and industry partners this year. Here are a few we can talk about:

• EDGE23: Lattice for Mission Autonomy was successfully demonstrated during this U.S. Army exercise at Yuma Proving Ground, where an integrated team of multiple uncrewed aircraft successfully located, identified, and destroyed a mock surface-to-air missile (SAM) site in support of soldiers conducting Army helicopter assault operations.
• Northern Edge: We participated in this Indo-Pacific Command-sponsored exercise with two Menace integrated command and control hardware systems. Notably, Anduril constructed and delivered the ISO container variant, Menace for ISO, and a Menace for Ultralight Tactical Vehicle (ULTV) prototype over a 90-day period for the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab (MCWL), the U.S. Air National Guard, and Air Force Reserve Command Test Center (AATC), respectively.
• WTI: At the U.S. Marine Corps’ Weapons and Tactics Instructor (WTI) course in Yuma, Arizona, Anduril demonstrated Menace-X for the first time. Prospective Weapons and Tactics instructors used the full capabilities of Menace-X to enable forward-deployed, integrated mesh networks for secure, low-latency sharing of time-sensitive mission data from operationally-relevant joint battle-networks.
• ALTIUS-600 UK Milestone: In partnership with Leonardo UK, Anduril engineers completed a series of live trials of new technologies which will underpin the development of Air Launched Effects (ALE) capabilities. Air Launched Effects include releasing and controlling drones in mid-air from host aircraft.
• Space Surveillance Network: After a severe storm resulted in widespread power outages and damage to infrastructure across the Hawaiian islands, to include degradation of legacy communications at the Maui SSN site, Anduril restored operational communications within 24 hours until legacy communications could be restored three weeks later.

That’s all for 2023. Now, it’s onward and upward into 2024!