Anduril secures $20B Army contract

THE LARGEST single contract ever awarded to a venture-backed defense firm dropped on a Friday evening, as such things tend to do. On March 13th the United States Army announced a deal worth as much as $20 billion with Anduril Industries — a ten-year agreement covering software, hardware, and services spanning everything from autonomous drones to command-and-control platforms. The timing was quiet; the implications are not.

Anduril, founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey (the erstwhile wunderkind behind the Oculus VR headset), has assembled a remarkable run of Pentagon wins in short order. The company assumed Microsoft's troubled $22 billion IVAS augmented-reality contract in early 2025. It won a spot competing for Golden Dome space-based interceptors alongside Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. It opened a solid-rocket-motor factory in Mississippi, becoming the nation's third supplier. Revenue reportedly doubled to roughly $2 billion in 2025, and a new funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital is expected to value the company at around $60 billion — up from $30.5 billion just nine months prior. For a firm that ranked 74th on the top-100 defense contractors list in fiscal year 2024, the trajectory is, to borrow the Pentagon's own preferred term, formidable.

The new contract establishes what the Army calls an "enterprise" procurement vehicle: a five-year base period with a five-year option, designed to eliminate the thicket of subcontractor markups and compress delivery timelines. Gabe Chiulli, the Defense Department's chief technology officer, framed the deal in language that would sound more natural in a Silicon Valley pitch deck than a Pentagon briefing room: the modern battlefield, he said, is "increasingly defined by software."