Brian Schimpf
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Brian Schimpf is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Anduril Industries, the defense AI and autonomous-systems company he started in 2017 with Palmer Luckey and three others. He ran engineering at the data-analytics firm Palantir for roughly a decade before Anduril, rising to director of engineering. Under Schimpf's day-to-day leadership the company grew from a startup into one of the most valuable privately held defense businesses in the United States, reaching a reported $61 billion valuation after a $5 billion Series H round in May 2026, with products spanning its Lattice command-and-control software, autonomous drones, counter-drone interceptors, and an uncrewed fighter aircraft.[1][3][7]
| Period | Role | Organization |
|---|---|---|
| to 2007 | B.S. in operations research and industrial engineering; led the DARPA Grand and Urban Challenge autonomous-vehicle teams | Cornell University |
| 2007 to 2017 | Engineer, rising to director of engineering | Palantir Technologies |
| 2017 to present | Co-founder and chief executive officer | Anduril Industries |
Brian Schimpf is an American engineer and technology executive, born around 1984 (he was 42 in 2026), who serves as chief executive officer of Anduril Industries, the defense-technology company he co-founded in 2017.[3] He is widely described as Anduril's operational center of gravity, the quiet engineer-CEO who runs the company day to day while co-founder Palmer Luckey serves as its public face.[1][3] Schimpf has spent most of his career building software and autonomy for national defense, first as an engineering leader at Palantir Technologies and then as Anduril's chief executive, and has said of the work, "I've been working on this problem for the better part of 20 years now."[3]
Schimpf grew up in Rochester, New York, where his mother and stepfather both worked as engineers at Eastman Kodak. He started programming as a ninth-grade student in the late 1990s and tinkered with projects ranging from carnival games to solar cars and theater lighting.[5] He attended Cornell University, earning a Bachelor of Science in operations research and industrial engineering in 2007, a degree centered on applied mathematics for decision-making. By several accounts he stayed an additional year to keep competing in robotics contests.[4][5]
At Cornell, Schimpf helped lead the university's entries in the DARPA autonomous-vehicle competitions. In the 2005 Grand Challenge, a desert race for driverless cars, he and fellow student Matt Grimm led a team whose vehicle crashed early in the event. For the 2007 Urban Challenge, which tested self-driving cars in simulated city traffic, the team fielded a modified Chevrolet Tahoe nicknamed "Skynet" that completed the course. Schimpf led its artificial-intelligence work and was a co-author of the team's widely cited 2008 paper, "Team Cornell's Skynet: Robust Perception and Planning in an Urban Environment."[1][5][11] Grimm would later co-found Anduril alongside him.
Schimpf joined Palantir in 2007 and stayed for roughly a decade, working on data integration and analysis for government and commercial customers. He started as an early member of the engineering organization and rose to director of engineering, leading teams that built Foundry, Palantir's commercial data-integration and analytics platform that was later deployed across many industries.[1][2][5] The work gave him experience selling and deploying complex software inside government agencies, a model he would carry into Anduril. He also met his future wife, Kori, while at the company.[5] He left Palantir in 2017 to help start Anduril.
In 2017 Schimpf co-founded Anduril Industries, which was incorporated in April of that year and seeded by the venture firm Founders Fund. The five co-founders were Schimpf; Palmer Luckey, creator of the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset; Trae Stephens, a Founders Fund partner who became executive chairman; Matt Grimm, Schimpf's former Cornell teammate and Palantir colleague, who became chief operating officer; and Joe Chen, a former Oculus engineer and U.S. Army National Guard paratrooper. Schimpf was the last of the group to commit. Although he was initially reluctant to run the company, the other founders agreed he should be chief executive. Executive chairman Trae Stephens later recalled, "I was absolutely convinced from day one that Brian needed to be the CEO of the company."[1][3][5][12] Anduril is based in Costa Mesa, California.
The company set out to apply Silicon Valley-style software and autonomy to national defense, and it adopted an unusual commercial model: rather than build to a government specification under traditional cost-plus contracts, Anduril privately funds development of finished products and then sells them. Its flagship is Lattice, an AI software platform that fuses data from sensors, drones, and other systems into a single operating picture and coordinates autonomous responses across them.[3][8]
Anduril's hardware portfolio grew quickly across more than a dozen product lines. Its first product was the Sentry, an autonomous surveillance tower used along the U.S. border by Customs and Border Protection. Later systems include the Ghost family of autonomous helicopter drones; the Anvil and reusable Roadrunner interceptors for counter-UAS (counter-drone) defense; the backpack-portable Bolt loitering munition; the Barracuda family of low-cost cruise missiles; and the Ghost Shark extra-large autonomous submarine, developed for the Royal Australian Navy.[3][12]
In April 2024 the U.S. Air Force selected Anduril's Fury, designated YFQ-44A, as one of two designs for the first increment of its Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, alongside General Atomics. The choice favored the two newer entrants over the established primes Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. The uncrewed fighter, intended to fly alongside crewed jets, made its first flight on October 31, 2025, which Anduril said came "from clean-sheet design to first flight in 556 days," and the Air Force selected both the Fury and General Atomics' YFQ-42A for an initial production contract in June 2026, with a combined 150 aircraft to be built by 2030.[3][9]
In February 2025 the Army moved its troubled Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) program, an augmented-reality headset effort originally awarded to Microsoft under an agreement worth up to $22 billion over ten years, to Anduril. Anduril folded the work into a renamed Soldier Borne Mission Command effort and in October 2025 unveiled a mixed-reality headset called EagleEye, built on Lattice software with display technology supplied through a partnership with Meta.[6][10]
In March 2026 the Army awarded Anduril a ten-year contract vehicle with a ceiling of up to $20 billion, consolidating more than 120 separate procurements and designating Lattice as the command-and-control backbone for the service's counter-drone operations. The figure is a maximum ceiling rather than guaranteed spending, and the Army placed an initial task order of about $87 million under it.[8]
Anduril roughly doubled its revenue each year, reaching about $1 billion in 2024 and $2.2 billion in 2025, a roughly 110 percent year-over-year increase, with management projecting around $4.3 billion in 2026.[3][7][12] The company employed more than 8,000 people by mid-2026, up from about 7,000 in late 2025. To scale production, it announced Arsenal-1 in January 2025, a hyperscale weapons-manufacturing plant of roughly 5 million square feet in Pickaway County, Ohio, projected to create more than 4,000 jobs; production of the Fury drone began there in March 2026.[3][7][12]
| Metric | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 (projected) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | about $1 billion | about $2.2 billion | about $4.3 billion |
| Year-over-year growth | - | about 110% | about 95% |
Anduril raised money in rapidly escalating rounds. Its June 2025 Series G brought in $2.5 billion at a $30.5 billion valuation, led by Founders Fund, whose roughly $1 billion check was described as the largest in the firm's history. Less than a year later, in May 2026, a $5 billion Series H led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz roughly doubled the valuation to $61 billion, bringing total funds raised to more than $11 billion, according to reporting by TechCrunch and Bloomberg dated May 13, 2026.[6][7]
| Date | Round | Amount raised | Valuation |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | Series D | $450 million | about $4.6 billion |
| August 2024 | Series F | $1.5 billion | $14 billion |
| June 2025 | Series G | $2.5 billion | $30.5 billion |
| May 2026 | Series H | $5 billion | $61 billion |
Schimpf is widely described as Anduril's operational center of gravity, and is known for a quiet, engineering-first management style that contrasts with the more public persona of co-founder Palmer Luckey. He favors giving engineers ownership and autonomy, reads research across disciplines, and follows technical communities closely. He has summarized his approach to talent simply: "Good people do well if you give them hard, ambitious stuff to do."[3][4][5]
He has pushed Anduril toward a product-led model in which the company builds and largely self-funds finished systems, then sells them to the government, rather than billing for development under traditional cost-plus contracts. He frequently frames the company's pitch around speed, telling Fortune of his approach to customers, "I always ask them: 'Do you want it where it's at, or do you want to wait another year?' Almost always the answer is: 'I'll take what you got right now.'"[3] Schimpf has also argued that the country is underprepared for industrial-scale conflict, saying, "Our munitions production rate and our stockpiles are at a dangerous level. War is inherently industrial in the modern era, and we are not prepared for that."[3]
Schimpf is a self-identified Democrat who has raised money for Joe Biden, an unusual profile in the defense industry, and he has resisted glorifying conflict, framing Anduril's mission around deterrence and saying of the company's work, "We are not pro-violence." He has framed the company's ambition in cautionary terms as well, telling Fortune, "The question isn't whether we can build the next Lockheed Martin. It's whether we can avoid becoming the thing we're trying to replace."[3] He was 42 years old in 2026, lives in Southern California near Anduril's headquarters, and is a father of two.[3][5]