Anduril CEO Palmer Luckey.

Anduril Industries, a three-year-old defense startup led by Palmer Luckey of Oculus fame, has been selected as a vendor that’ll work on a cutting-edge Internet of Things (IoT) network for the United States Air Force. Anduril is one out of a total of more than 50 vendors that the Air Force has courted to work on what’s called an Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS), referring to a vast IoT network that’ll be adopted by the US Air Force to collect, analyze, and share information and aid in making real-time decisions.

Under the terms of Anduril’s deal with the US Air Force, the company will receive funding for its work, funding that’s not exactly disclosed but is noted as anywhere between $1,000 up until $950 million. Anduril along with other participants in the program will be paid over the next five years for work in different ABMS categories. Along with Anduril, another notable newly announced vendor for the military project is Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing arm of e-commerce giant Amazon. Both Anduril and Amazon aren’t new to working with the military, having both picked up significant and sizable military contracts in past time, most notably Amazon whose work with U.S. governmental agencies have amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars. 

In its short life span (of three years), Anduril has picked up a significant number of deals for U.S. federal agencies such as in July of this year when the company signed a contract with the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency to deploy portable surveillance towers across US borders, a five-year contract that was said to be worth “several hundred million dollars.” The Irvine-based company has also scored surveillance contracts with the U.S. Marine Corps and even with the UK’s Royal Navy. 

Anduril doesn’t operate like a typical defense contractor, given the company usually funds its own research and development and then sells products out of the box. This strategy isn’t rather common among big-name defense contractors, whom typically get funding for their product development process all the way from concept to design. In just three years of existence, Anduril has clinched a handful of defense contracts, with a bigger goal of becoming a major defense contractor in the US. “I want to become one of the major defense contractors that’s building technology for the United States Government,” quoting the exact words of Anduril’s chief executive, Palmer Luckey.

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