#foundersfund

AI-powered defense technology startup Anduril Industries is in negotiations for a new funding round that could push its valuation to $28 billion, sources revealed on Friday. The round, expected to raise up to $2.5 billion, would be led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, signaling continued investor interest in the rapidly expanding defense tech sector. This funding comes just months after Anduril raised $1.5 billion at a $14 billion valuation in August.

Founders Fund has been a key investor in Anduril since its inception in 2017, and one of its co-founders, Trae Stephens, is also a partner at the firm. While Founders Fund declined to comment, the news was first reported by CNBC.

Anduril, based in Costa Mesa, California, specializes in developing autonomous defense systems, including drones and a variety of sensors. The company recently announced plans to build a large-scale weapons manufacturing plant in central Ohio, using the new funding to enhance its production capabilities.

In 2023, Anduril unveiled its Lattice for Mission Autonomy, an AI-driven software system designed to enable autonomous units to collaborate during missions under human oversight.

Before founding Anduril, Palmer Luckey, who started the company, gained recognition for founding Oculus VR, which Facebook acquired in 2014 for $2.3 billion. Anduril also has connections in the political sphere, with U.S. Vice President JD Vance having invested in the company before his political career.

When we set out to build RigUp, we wanted to build a business and a technology that would catalyze positive impact across a vital industry. We had hundreds of meetings with energy executives, field operations, petroleum engineers, and community groups about the state of the energy industry. A common theme of improving “trust” emerged; trust between the operators and service companies, trust between field operations and finance teams, and most importantly trust between communities and the companies operating in their backyards. RigUp is building technology to restore trust in the energy sector. We’re putting together a team of world-class petroleum and software engineers to solve problems that at one point in time seemed unsolvable.

To meet demand from a growing global middle class, McKinsey estimates that global energy resource productivity will have to increase at a 3.2% per annum rate going forward compared to a 1.7% per annum rate from 1990-2010. With 66% of oilfield workers set to retire in the next 10-15 years, the great men and women working in the energy industry have a large task at hand to meet the world’s energy needs. Improved productivity must come alongside stronger environmental stewardship and safety benchmarks, and modern technology is required to improve upon legacy platforms and processes.

RigUp helps producers and service companies visualize and manage assets on location. Using big data and analytics, we allow industry participants to optimize their assets for safety, efficiency, and higher environmental standards without sacrificing performance and economics. Asset level safety and tracking is key to formulating optimal development plans. Our team has a strong focus to reduce the “idiosyncratic risk” of field operations, and our platform will eliminate lapse time and disputes for service companies. We have partnered with a select group of operators and service companies as we begin testing the first version of our platform, and we look forward to bringing on additional partners in the coming months.

Recently, we closed a $3mn series seed round led by Founders Fund. We are humbled to have Founders Fund on board as our anchor investor. We’re proud to call Austin, Texas home and excited about fostering a great start-up engineering culture.

Here’s to the future, y’all.