There’s a new article from The Generalist Reader called Anduril: The Business of Defense. Tons of interest on the background and offerings the company has developed or acquired in just five years since its founding in 2017. Here’s a slice:
According to Trae Stephens, it took SpaceX five years to hit $10 million in revenue. Such timelines are not uncommon in the defense industry – indeed, many other businesses have likely taken longer to reach that landmark. “It was really hard at Palantir and SpaceX,” Stephens said of accumulating revenue, “Like ridiculously hard.” Anduril managed to reach the same figure in twenty-two months. Within four years, it hit $100 million. Last year, it was mooted to have taken in $150 million in revenue.
Trae said they were able to learn from the experiences of SpaceX and Palantir to accelerate their sales motion to government. Moreover, he said that it takes Anduril 9 to 12 months to build a product that reaches a “minimally viable demonstration.” It seem that a lot of those products are building off of core enterprise capabilities like Lattice, or adding sensors or effectors to that. Here’s more from the article:
The genius of what Anduril has built is best understood by viewing how its products work in concert. Leveraging Lattice as the brain, Anduril combines its hardware capabilities to solve specific problems. It has created Counter-UAS, Counter Intrusion, and Maritime Counter Intrusion offerings.
Counter-UAS does what you expect: detecting and stopping enemy aerial campaigns. To do that, Anduril pulls together four products: Lattice, a long-range sentry tower, WISP, and Anvil. You can imagine how this all works together. The sentry tower scans the skies for threats, aided by WISP’s 360-degree vision. The data they collect is routed into Lattice for observation and decision-making. Once a threat is detected, an operative decides what to do via Lattice. If the best decision is to disable it, Anvil is launched to knock it down.
Building a lot of this themselves, and then adding complexity and hardware on top of that runs with their thesis of software-native defense systems. The issue will be whether their business model can be adopted by government at a much larger scale. Can a nontraditional company stay nontraditional at scale through OTAs, commercial items, full-and-open competition, or SBIR Phase III sole sources? Or will the bureaucracy want to bring Anduril into the fold of negotiated contracts and cost plus?
Anyway, I pulled together a summary of Anduril’s family of products based on their website for your convenience:
- Lattice is at the center of Anduril’s product. The software system acts as a command hub, pulling in information from sensors, drones, and other field assets. Using artificial intelligence and computer vision, Lattice constructs a live, detailed view of a battlefield, accessible via computer, tablet, or VR headset. Critically, Lattice is built such that it can sync with assets made by other companies.
- Sentry towers includes sensors and radars to detect and track threats. Comes in four types: one standard offering, one focused on long-range detection, one suitable for cold weather (camera lenses can freeze over in low temperatures), and one for maritime services.
- Dust is an expeditionary ground sensor that autonomously detects and classifies targets of interest before alerting users. Dust utilizes radar, imagery, and edge computing to screen targets. Weighing just four pounds with a battery life of more than two months (and a solar panel for longer operations), Dust extends surveillance operations.
- WISP offers 360-degree “situational awareness” using passive infrared imagers. WISP can be placed on ships, sentry towers, tactical vehicles, or on the ground. Detects Group 1 UAS up to 5km away, Group 3+ UAS 20km or more.
- Ghost is a drone that a single person can assemble in just three minutes. It can fly for sixty minutes and does so nearly silently, making it ideal for covert surveillance. Operators can easily manage a suite of Ghost drones simultaneously. 37 lbs, 15.5 mile radio line of sight range, 12,000 ft altitude, and 5 lbs payload capacity.
- Altius is a drone that launches from a T-shirt cannon-like tube. Its four different models can be positioned on helicopters, tactical vehicles, and ships, and boast impressive reach. The furthest-ranging drone, Altius-900, can fly for more than 15 hours and travel 620 miles weighing 90 lbs.
- Anvil is the most distinct of the bunch in that it is not designed for surveillance so much as defense. Deployed from what looks like a big suitcase, Anvil is designed to knock enemy drones out of the sky.
- Dive-LD is an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) capable of conducting surveys that may last weeks, reaching depths of 6,000 meters. Because of its endurance, Dive-LD can launch from a pier, make its way out into the deep ocean, then return. The exterior body is 3D printed.
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