Defense tech startup Anduril Industries, which works closely with the U.S. Defense and Homeland Security departments, has been on a hiring tear as it plans to open up a new manufacturing facility and eventually go public.
In an onstage interview with Fortune on Wednesday, Anduril Executive Chairman Trae Stephens revealed that the defense company’s headcount is now over 3,500 people—nearly 46% larger than the headcount it reported at the end of December.
“It’s big in startup standards,” Stephens said of Anduril’s size at the Roadrunner Technology Forum in Albuquerque. “It’s very small when you compare to our competition, which are really the big five primes,” he said, referring to the defense industry incumbents Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman.
Anduril, which was founded in 2017 by Stephens and several other entrepreneurs including Oculus VR headset creator Palmer Luckey, announced last month that it had raised a whopping $1.5 billion in capital. The funding valued Anduril at $14 billion, up from the $8.5 billion valuation Anduril fetched during a 2022 funding round.
Stephens said in the interview that Anduril’s cash position could have lasted the company until the end of 2025, but said that the company raised the capital to prepare for fighter jet manufacturing as well as build the “relationships that we need” to start preparing for an eventual IPO. (Anduril added public market investors like Fidelity and Bailie Gifford to its cap table for the first time in its August funding round.)
In April, the Air Force selected Anduril and surveillance aircraft company General Atomics over Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman to design, manufacture, and test unmanned fighter jets that could be implemented into the Air Force fleet. Stephens said on stage that while the timeline will be up to the Pentagon, Anduril needs to “be ready to build hundreds in a couple of years.”
While Stephens says that all of Anduril’s products rely on the same underlying autonomous technology, the company needs to invest a lot of capital into the hardware for these jets. “We’re building fighter planes, and so that means everything from propulsion systems to avionics to sensor payloads and so forth,” he said. “So there’s a big manufacturing assembly component there that will require a lot of capital expenditures and a deep labor pool to be able to scale that over time.”
Anduril has said it expects its new manufacturing facility to be approximately 5 million square feet and to eventually produce “tens of thousands of autonomous military systems annually.” The company has yet to select a specific location for the facility.
