Anduril Industries has taken another step forward in his quest to become the next great American Prime Minister, this time beating out major defense companies to develop and test a small unmanned fighter jet prototype.
The venture capital darling beat out Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman in the deal under the Air Force’s Cooperative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program. General Atomics was the second awardee out of a group of five.
Anduril and General Atomics will design, build and test a “production representative test article” as part of the contract work, the Air Force said in a statement. Ultimately, the Air Force will make a final, billion-dollar production decision in fiscal year 2026 and receive fully operational aircraft from suppliers before the end of the decade. It is unclear whether the Air Force will select more than one company to deliver the production aircraft.
The deal could prove very profitable for Anduril: after all, the CCA program aims to deliver at least 1,000 combat aircraft, which will fly in tandem with manned platforms such as the F-35 and deliver their own weapons. The CCA program is part of an Air Force initiative called Next Generation Air Dominance; It aims to modernize the entire fleet of flight systems, including piloted aircraft (Boeing and Lockheed are still in the running for the manned systems contract).
At the center of Anduril’s win is Fury, an autonomous air vehicle it acquired when it bought North Carolina-based Blue Force Technologies last year. Anduril went from acquiring the technology to winning a major defense award with it in less than a year.
The seven-year-old startup was valued at $8.5 billion by investors including Founders Fund in 2022, when it announced its $1.48 billion Series E. Anduril’s 31-year-old founder, Palmer Luckey, has been vocal about overturning the zero-sum paradigm. This paradigm has dominated defense spending – meaning the defense chief wins and the taxpayer loses – cheapening assets at a very fast pace. While still generating great revenue for its supporters.
“Anduril’s work on this program is just getting started,” Anduril SVP Jason Levin said in a statement. “CCA needs to be delivered at the speed, cost, and scale to defeat the growing threat to future US and allied success. “We look forward to continuing our partnership with the U.S. Air Force to deliver this critical capability to our Airmen as quickly as possible.”
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