How Anduril Is Fueling VC’s Push Into Defense Tech

Anduril, the defense tech startup that says it’s trying to build the “Lockheed Martin of the 21st century,” laid out lofty goals to investors early last year. It set its sights on $1 billion in annual revenue by 2026, five times its expectation for $200 million of revenue in 2022.

Achieving that ambition will be expensive. The six-year-old startup, valued last year at $8.5 billion by Founders Fund and others, told investors it expected to burn a total of $2 billion in cash between 2021 and 2026. And it expected to incur hundreds of millions of dollars in net losses each of those years as it develops and sells drones, missiles, submarines and border protection systems to U.S. agencies and allied governments.