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Wealthy individual investors are willing to pay nearly double the $30.5 billion valuation institutions got in Anduril’s last fundraising.

Defense tech company Anduril expects to burn through $800 million to $900 million in cash this year in an aggressive bid to win giant Pentagon contracts. Investors big and small are unperturbed, lining up to back the fast-growing seller of drones, missiles and border surveillance towers.

The company appears to be the most coveted stock in the private markets, with small investors on the secondary market willing to pay nearly double what institutions most recently paid. That’s a far higher premium than small investors are paying for shares of other popular private companies such as SpaceX or OpenAI. Demand for Anduril shares has soared in recent weeks as executives did the rounds of popular podcasts and discussed the company’s fast revenue growth.

New, big investors have also bought in recently. GV, the independent venture capital arm of Alphabet, took a more than $30 million indirect stake in Anduril earlier this year on the secondary market, a person familiar with the matter said. Alphabet, GV’s sole limited partner, earlier this year scrapped a pledge to not “pursue” AI technologies that cause harm, like weapons. A GV spokesperson declined to comment.

Early investor Founders Fund told its limited partners earlier this year it had invested a total of nearly $2 billion in the company over the years, a stake now worth about $6 billion. The firm led a funding round in June that valued Anduril at $30.5 billion.

David You, a small investor who invests his family’s wealth, put more than $1 million into an indirect stake in Anduril via the secondary market earlier this year at a price that was roughly 60% above what institutional investors had paid just months earlier. He’s paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees to get in the door. Secondary market deals typically let small investors buy into private companies through special purpose vehicles, rather than buying shares directly from the company.

“Someone told me Anduril is Tesla plus Palantir,” he said. “I fully agree.” He added that he also thought Anduril “has more potential than SpaceX.”

The company appears to be made for the current moment. Anduril has connections with President Donald Trump’s administration, an America-first marketing message and a meme-lord billionaire co-founder, Palmer Luckey. Revenue is expected to double this year, company executives have said.

The company’s cash burn this year will help fund its first major weapons manufacturing facility and the development of an autonomous fighter jet, among other projects.

Anduril’s backers have encouraged the heavy investments because they increase the likelihood that the company will win larger long-term contracts from the Pentagon over bigger, more entrenched defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, leading to profits over time. Anduril often shuns government subsidies to help develop new products, using its balance sheet instead. That’s an expensive approach.

Chip Walter, a former Northrop Grumman executive who is now a managing partner at Anduril investor Marlinspike Partners, said the goal is to win big government contracts, known as programs of record, which are formal initiatives that last several years. “Getting on a program of record is not easy, but if you do, the revenue tends to be very sticky,” he said.

A lingering question is when regular investors will be able to buy the stock on the public markets instead of through secondaries. Josh Wolfe, co-founder of Lux Capital, an early Anduril investor, said on an investment panel last week he thought Anduril would go public “within the next year.”

“I think it’ll be a $50 billion–plus [initial public offering] on $3 billion of top-line revenue with high growth,” Wolfe said. That market cap would make Anduril about two-thirds as valuable as Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics, even though Anduril would have less than 10% of their respective annual revenues.

“We’re not in a rush and don’t need the distraction,” Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf told The Information earlier this month. A Lux spokesperson said Wolfe has no specific knowledge of the company’s IPO plans or revenue targets.

Wealthy individuals and funds have been willing to pay nearly double Anduril’s most recent $30.5 billion valuation in the secondary market for shares, said Javier Avalos, CEO of Caplight, which tracks the secondary market. That compares to a premium of 14% for OpenAI, while small investors can get shares of SpaceX at roughly the same price the big guys got in the last funding round, according to Caplight.

Demand for Anduril’s shares has jumped recently. “Over the past two weeks, buyer willingness to pay has increased,” Avalos said. He added that investors are clamoring for stakes because “there is currently no supply in the market.”

Anduril, for its part, said it doesn’t allow such secondary sales outside formal tender offers it runs. “Anyone claiming they can offer Anduril secondary shares is probably misrepresenting the facts and may be defrauding buyers, to say nothing of charging layers of egregious fees,” Anduril’s chief operating officer, Matt Grimm, said in a statement to The Information.

The demand also seems impervious to potential negative impacts of the prolonged government shutdown, which Schimpf said earlier this month would also stall its progress. (The first test flight for its Air Force fighter jet, Fury, was delayed from a mid-October plan.)

Some of the recent enthusiasm for Anduril may be traced to its efforts to raise its profile. In August, it became the lead sponsor of a San Diego NASCAR race, as well as of Ohio State athletics. Co-founder Trae Stephens appeared on the popular Shawn Ryan podcast, while Luckey sat with Joe Rogan.

You, the Anduril retail investor, said he decided on his investment in Anduril after doing heavy research. He didn’t know about the company’s cash burn, but he thought it was more important to focus on its revenue growth.

“I’m really confident,” he said. He was working on a deal to buy another $600,000 worth of SPV stakes at more than $100 a share, a price that implies an Anduril valuation of more than $70 billion.