Anduril Hits $61B as Thrive and a16z Lead Record $5B Series H for Autonomous Defense
Palmer Luckey's defense tech firm doubled its valuation in less than a year, capping a defense funding surge that has poured nearly $13.6 billion into the sector since January.
Anduril Industries announced on May 13, 2026 that it has raised $5 billion in a Series H funding round, doubling its valuation to $61 billion in less than a year. The round was led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, both returning investors that doubled down on the autonomous defense startup as it scales production of weapons systems, autonomous vessels, and battle-management software for the U.S. military and allied governments.
The new valuation is more than twice the $30.5 billion mark Anduril hit in June 2025, when Founders Fund led a $2.5 billion round. Total capital raised by the nine-year-old company now exceeds $11 billion, an extraordinary figure for a defense manufacturer whose category was, until recently, considered too capital-intensive and politically sensitive for venture investors. "When we founded Anduril in 2017, defense was not a category that attracted significant venture investment," CEO Brian Schimpf said. "That has changed meaningfully over the last several years."
The Series H lands as defense-tech startups shatter funding records. Anduril alone is responsible for a large share of the nearly $13.6 billion that has flowed into national security and wartime technology startups through mid-May 2026, per Crunchbase data. The company doubled its revenue to $2.2 billion in 2025 and has been winning a string of high-profile contracts, including space-based missile defense work, deals with the Dutch Ministry of Defence, and a U.S. Army battle manager contract built on its Lattice software platform. A new autonomous warship operation in Seattle was also announced this week.
For investors, Anduril is increasingly seen as the prime AI-native counterweight to legacy primes like Lockheed Martin and RTX. The thesis: software-defined weapons systems built around modern machine learning stacks, manufactured at scale, can be fielded faster and cheaper than the bespoke hardware programs that have dominated Pentagon procurement for decades. With this round, Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz are betting that defense will remain one of the most lucrative downstream markets for the same agentic AI tooling now reshaping enterprise software—and that Anduril, not the incumbents, will capture the next decade of contracts.
