Defense tech disruptor Anduril passed several milestones on Wednesday. The company announced a $5 billion funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital—doubling its valuation in under a year for the second time in a row, this time to $61 billion. In the process, it minted its third billionaire, CEO and cofounder Brian Schimpf, and amped up the fortunes of billionaire cofounders Palmer Luckey and Trae Stephens.
Forbes estimates that Schimpf, 42, is now worth $1.5 billion with an over 2% stake in the firm. (He and Anduril declined to comment.) That ranks him among over 30 billionaires worldwide whose fortunes stem from defense, roughly a third of whom are American. That number is almost certain to balloon as the Pentagon continues to solicit a new generation of defense contractors who come from the startup world, rather than the old and bloated ecosystem of the “big five” primes.
Anduril is well on its way to creating a wave of billionaires on its own. Its colorful cofounder Palmer Luckey, 33, got rich selling his VR glasses company Oculus to Facebook at age 21 in 2014. He joined the three-comma ranks in 2022 thanks to Anduril, which he started in 2017 after being pushed out of Silicon Valley for supporting Trump. This latest raise brings his fortune to $5 billion, up from $3.5 billion before it closed. Anduril’s cofounder and executive chairman Trae Stephens crossed the $1 billion mark after the company’s Series G raise in June 2025; now he’s worth $1.8 billion. Cofounders Matt Grimm and Joseph Chen could be next.
Schimpf, who was a friend of Stephens from their days at Palantir, has helmed Anduril since the beginning and is spearheading a pace of growth that surprises even him. The company has about 8,000 employees, generated $2.2 billion in revenue last year, and is delivering software and products that are already widely used across the U.S. military. In March, the Army announced a $20 billion enterprise contract to consolidate its Anduril purchasing, noting that the Pentagon already had over 120 separate deals with the company.
“I thought we’d be at this point five, six years from now,” Schimpf told the “Sourcery” podcast in December.
Schimpf grew up near Rochester, New York, a kid who loved coding and robotics. He got a bachelor of science at Cornell, then joined as an early software engineer at Palantir in 2007. CEO Alex Karp empowered him to take on lots of responsibility—in fact, giving engineers high autonomy is a lesson Schimpf often says he’s taken from Palantir to Anduril—and eventually promoted him to director of engineering.
He and Stephens, who met at Palantir before Stephens left to become a partner at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, were already toying around with the idea of starting a defense company of their own. The ideal opportunity seemed to arise in Luckey’s infamous firing from Facebook in 2017. Luckey was then a free agent; he, Stephens, Grimm (another Palantir alum) and Chen (an Oculus alum) committed to launching Anduril—and poached Schimpf as a first step.
Originally they asked him to be head of software. Schimpf said he’d do it, but not immediately, as he had projects he wanted to finish at Palantir. “Then they did the first pitch meeting and didn’t have a CEO,” he explained during a talk at Cornell in January. The prospective investors said, “‘This sounds cool…. [But] you can’t have a company without someone in charge! What are you doing?’” Stephens and Grimm called Schimpf that night and offered him the CEO position. That one he couldn’t pass up.
So assembled Anduril’s founding fivesome. Their vision was a shared conviction that the U.S. military wasn’t adequately preparing for the wars of the future: It needed assets that were cheaper, faster to make and autonomous.
Today, Anduril tackles an ever-widening set of solutions, but leading the pack is Lattice, the software that powers all of the company’s autonomous products and consolidates data streams and systems across the military into a central operating picture. Recent milestones include winning a Pentagon contract for at least 3,000 autonomous Barracuda-500M missiles and a Royal Australian Navy contract for a fleet of massive underwater “Ghost Shark” drones.
“We are working on everything defense. We are shockingly broad,” Schimpf told the Cornell audience. “I would not advocate this as a product strategy to most people, but for our market it makes a lot of sense. In defense, you’re not going to have any one product that scales to $10 billion a year in revenue. It’s just not really how that works. You’re going to have a lot of products that you can scale to $1 billion a year in revenue, and a lot that are $100, $200, $300 million.”
Anduril’s and Schimpf’s skyrocketing fortunes indicate that the strategy seems to be working.
