Inside Anduril’s Big Gamble: An Ohio Weapons Factory
The defense tech startup has promised its investors it can grow into its giant valuation, pinning its hopes to a manufacturing facility that’s just revving up.
Just past the soybean farms in Pickaway County, Ohio, stands a flat-roofed building clad in blue and gray panels, with John Deere tractors near the entrance and hard hat–wearing construction workers busily laying pipes in the ground.
The 866,000-square-foot factory isn’t much to behold—it looks like any of the many humble industrial warehouses that line the roads near Rickenbacker International Airport, a Midwest cargo hub. But the company behind the facility—Anduril, a highly valued defense tech startup—has attached lofty dreams to the factory: It hopes the site will greatly increase its manufacturing capacity and help it satisfy the goals it gave investors in recent weeks as it sought $4 billion of fresh capital.
Inside, Keith Flynn, Anduril’s bearded, broad-shouldered manufacturing chief, stands in front of glossy renderings of what the company hopes to eventually add to this pocket of Ohio 20 minutes south of Columbus: a full Silicon Valley–style campus with a half-dozen buildings over a 500-acre site. As Anduril puts finishing touches on the factory, construction is just beginning on a second building close by. The startup has already chosen a chest-thumping name for the campus: Arsenal 1.
At the entrance to the factory floor, Flynn offered some words of explanation. “It’s going to look different than you expect,” he said. “It’s going to look very simple.” Indeed it does: There are no expensive robots or giant cranes—just rows of tool cabinets and bare workbenches. I didn’t even find many humans there this week when I visited: Work here will officially begin in a few weeks.
The workstations for those humans are sparsely appointed. The factory’s workers—most of them pulled from the area—won’t need much specialized equipment to paint and attach wings to the Fury autonomous fighter jets, the first product Anduril will manufacture here. “To be blunt, they’re not that complicated,” said Matt Grimm, Anduril’s co-founder and chief operating officer. “Intentionally.”
At the moment, Anduril is a minnow in the defense world, which is still dominated by established giants, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon. They’re the ones supplying the missiles and drones for the war in Iran right now, and Anduril hasn’t played a role in the other major conflict that has unfolded since its founding in 2017: Ukraine’s war against Russia, which has largely been fueled by Ukrainian companies, as well as older U.S. firms.
Anduril hasn’t come close to winning the number of lucrative government contracts required to justify a continued build-out of its megacampus. It did score a notable win in 2024 when it became a finalist in an Air Force competition for designing an autonomous, unmanned fighter jet—prompting it to begin developing its Fury jets. But even that victory has a significant caveat: Anduril might prevail in the end, or the lucrative Air Force contract could award more of the deal to General Atomics, a larger, more experienced competitor, also a finalist.
The factory is Anduril’s massive wager that it can—and will—eventually win those contracts and many more. But it can’t begin to win bigger contracts without the facility. If everything goes well, Anduril hopes it can build 150 Fury jets per year on that one factory floor, across three shifts. That would be worth potentially billions of dollars in sales by the end of the decade. Anduril has said it would spend more than $900 million of its own money on the campus over the decade, to go alongside the more than $750 million in economic development grants and state tax credits it has already secured.
Under a haze of industrial light, Grimm described the approach: “If we build it, we will fill it.” More grandly, he continued: “We’re going to build this massive complex to manifest our production future.”
Anduril’s investors have high hopes that Grimm and his co-founders, including Palmer Luckey and CEO Brian Schimpf, can pull off something massive. Their backers include some of Silicon Valley’s biggest firms, including Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz and Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital. And last month, investors started talks to place a new $60 billion valuation on Anduril, making it worth nearly half as much as Lockheed Martin even though it did just 3% of Lockheed’s sales last year. Giving investors some additional fuel for optimism recently was a U.S. Army agreement to spend as much as $20 billion on Anduril products over the next decade, although the money isn’t guaranteed and little of it has changed hands.
Those VCs are also rewarding Anduril for its recent growth. It expects to double revenue for the fourth straight year—reaching $4.3 billion—aided by a handful of large, ongoing government contracts, like building systems that detect and shoot down small drones that fly near U.S. Marines bases, as well as autonomous submarines for the Royal Australian Navy. Overall, Anduril expects to hit about $16 billion in sales by 2030. But it remains deeply unprofitable. The company lost more than $800 million last year and expects operating losses to surpass $1 billion for the next four years as it hires more workers and builds more factories, The Information reported this month.
The simple-looking factory in Ohio is Anduril’s key to sustainable profits, Flynn said. Producing more weapons spreads out the company’s fixed costs—factories and workers—over more revenue-generating products. It’s trying to avoid manufacturing bottlenecks by sourcing the vast majority of its components from commercially available products: For instance, the engine on Fury, its fighter jet, usually powers private planes. The technique for shaping materials on Barracuda, its cruise missile, is the same one that’s used for bathtubs and recreational boats.
Traditional defense contractors have been slow to build new manufacturing plants and usually only build facilities tied to products with locked-in government contracts, said Jerry McGinn, director of the Center for the Industrial Base and a former official in the Department of Defense. “Companies are using facilities they’ve been using since World War II in a lot of cases,” McGinn said.
Anduril’s older competitors still don’t think it has an easy road ahead. Lockheed Martin CEO James Taiclet said at an investor conference last year that Anduril would eventually get slowed down by the same massive Pentagon bureaucracy Lockheed faces. Anduril may essentially be in its honeymoon period. “When they start to scale, unless the government changes its contracting policy, they will be in the same regime that we’ll be in,” he said.
Anduril’s chief competitor to win the Fury jet contract, family-owned General Atomics, known for its Predator and Reaper drones, has honed its manufacturing processes over three decades and has never taken any venture capital. It has about 5 million square feet of manufacturing space in San Diego—the same amount Anduril aims to build in Ohio over the next decade. “The company didn’t try to race to the finish line, which has been one of the keys to our success,” said C. Mark Brinkley, a General Atomics spokesperson.
Anduril’s ambitions to build missiles and fighter jets date back to its 2017 founding. But in those early years, it focused mostly on software and sensors to detect drones, objects and people outside the U.S. border and on military bases. A factory like the one in Ohio didn’t seem to be part of the plans. Then in 2022, the company quietly signaled to its backers that it wanted to step up its ambitions: Early that year, it reported to investors that it had come up about 11% short of its target to win new contracts. The “delay on meaningful revenue from new products means we have to invest now in the ‘big bets’ that will power revenue in years to come” through acquisitions or research and development, Anduril executives wrote to investors in a memo I obtained from 2022.
Anduril did get aggressive with M&A, using its abundant venture funding to buy small defense companies that helped it advance with key contracts. One of those acquisitions—of a Boston-based startup, Dive, that built autonomous submarines—helped Anduril win the roughly $1 billion contract with the Australian Navy. Anduril also bought Blue Force Technologies, a small North Carolina company that had been working with the U.S. Air Force on an autonomous jet design. That acquisition helped Anduril create its Fury design.
Flynn joined Anduril in 2023, after spending his career opening auto factories for Toyota and Tesla. Before taking the job, Flynn toured the startup’s research and development space in Southern California. “I looked around, and I’m like, ‘This feels like a prototype shop,’” he recalled.
Around then, Anduril executives also began thinking about a plan to look for a big swath of land they could buy for factories before the company had guaranteed contracts. They dubbed the plan “Project Hershey,” drawing the name from the company town founded by the chocolate business in early-20th-century Pennsylvania. Anduril decided, “Let’s just take a big swing,” said Grimm. “We found it here in Ohio.”
The company announced the Ohio factory development in early 2025, promising to bring 4,000 defense manufacturing jobs to the state, a tantalizing proposal for many local politicians. CT Realty, an Orange County, Calif.–based builder that owns the factory development site, was already developing the first building, expecting an e-commerce company to use it as a distribution center. Rezoning plans for the site have drawn protesters who worry about the factory’s impact on nearby wetlands and on the local Indigenous community, according to The Scioto Post, a local news site. But the company has gone on a local charm offensive. It became a major sponsor of Ohio State athletics, and Luckey, Anduril’s most famous face (and goatee), dined with local business leaders at a downtown steakhouse last week.
Some Ohioans are already bracing for some kind of disappointment from Anduril. Zach Schiller, research director at Policy Matters Ohio, a progressive think tank, said he has watched other major manufacturers miss the mark recently, including Honda, which scaled back an electric vehicle plant here recently, and Intel, which has faced delays for a major semiconductor plant in the state. He’s not convinced Anduril can do better.
“Anduril, whatever its bona fides—I know it has substantial ones and a lot of political clout—it’s not Honda and Intel,” Schiller said.
One of the people in charge of ensuring success in Ohio is John Malone, Anduril’s head of production for the Fury. The mustachioed Ohio native lives in San Francisco but is moving to Ohio as the factory begins to assemble the jets. Malone worked for Tesla in the mid-2010s, to help the carmaker navigate its way out of “production hell,” as he put it, during Model X production. Later, he built the production team at Kitty Hawk, Larry Page’s flying-car startup, which shut down in 2022.
Anduril’s first assembly-line workers will get going here soon, creating a new thrum of activity in the rural area. What will the factory sound like? “There’s some minor drilling we do, but in general, it’s a pretty quiet thing,” he said. “The loudest thing is the boom box, and if it’s mariachi Monday, that’s usually the loudest thing in the factory.”
Malone is keeping an open mind, realizing that the company might not get to build as many jets as it wants to. That’s why “basically everything you see at this station is on wheels or completely moveable,” said Malone from the factory floor. “If we were not to win the next phase of the [Air Force] contract, this space could easily be repurposed again” to build missiles or submarines. “In a land-locked state, it might not make sense, but we can make submarines here,” he said. “We can shift capacity based on demand.”
Across the factory floor are 44 televisions that display the Anduril logo. Soon, the TVs will display a customized dashboard, ArsenalOS, that tracks the number of quality issues and safety problems. For now, the screen only displays rows of green: all good for now—with zero activity going on. Malone expects that will change. “You can imagine: If you’re looking down the line and you see 22 stations, the more reds you see, it’s probably where all of us should focus our time,” he said.