Anduril Industries, the defense technology company Palmer Luckey co-founded in 2017, raised $2.5 billion in June 2025 in a Series G round that valued the business at $30.5 billion. Founders Fund led the financing with a $1 billion investment.
Anduril executive chair and co-founder Trae Stephens, who is also a Founders Fund partner, disclosed the financing. The company develops autonomous weapons and software to control them. Anduril said its revenue doubled in 2024 to about $1 billion.
Anduril’s early work included Lattice, a system combining surveillance sensors and software for border monitoring. By 2018, the company was testing towers equipped with radar and cameras, displaying information through interfaces that included a virtual reality headset.
Luckey co-founded Anduril the same year he left Facebook, which had acquired Oculus in 2014. His departure followed controversy over his political activities. Details of his exit remained undisclosed in 2018. At a Senate hearing that April, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said Luckey had not been dismissed because of his politics.
From Oculus prototypes to Facebook
Luckey grew up in Long Beach, California, where his mother homeschooled him and his father worked as a car salesman. He experimented with electronics in the family garage and funded his projects by repairing and selling phones. Luckey said he earned at least $36,000 at age 16 by fixing iPhones and selling unlocked handsets online.
His interest in immersive gaming led him to collect older virtual reality equipment and build his own headsets. His designs combined lightweight lenses with software that corrected image distortion, using mobile phone displays to help reduce cost and weight.
Luckey shared his work on online forums, attracting the attention of Doom developer John Carmack. Carmack obtained a prototype and demonstrated it at the E3 video game trade show.
Oculus began offering early Rift development kits through Kickstarter in August 2012. The campaign raised more than $2.4 million from more than 9,500 backers. The company subsequently raised a $16 million Series A round in June 2013 and a $75 million Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz that December.
On March 25, 2014, Facebook announced an agreement to acquire Oculus for approximately $2 billion in cash and stock. The agreement provided for an additional $300 million in cash and stock if specified milestones were achieved. Facebook said Oculus had received more than 75,000 orders for Rift development kits at the time.
