Anduril Demonstrates Bolt Attack Drone at West Texas Test Site Amid Growing U.S. Military Contracts

Brian Schimpf handed a three-pound tungsten warhead to a Fortune journalist at Anduril’s test site in West Texas. U.S. Marine Corps.

During a demonstration at the same Texas test site the Bolt drone shot up vertically, careened toward hills and then dived at an 85-degree angle. The test occurred at a remote location featuring a sprawling cattle ranch nearby and a dust devil visible in the distance, with Anduril’s presence marked by trailers and a hangar for visiting planes.

U.S. Military. Lattice is a software and data layer that gives military teams a shared operational picture of the battlefield and can integrate data from other vendors’ sensors. The company’s Ghost Shark autonomous submarine is under long-term contract with the Royal Australian Navy.

In 2024 Anduril was selected to help develop the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, beating Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. U.S. Army worth up to $20 billion over the next 10 years.

U.S. military bases and are currently deployed in the Middle East. Anduril sent Altius drones in large numbers to Ukraine.

“If the Ukraine war were to start a year from now, the first thing we’d be sending is Barracuda,” Brian Schimpf said. U.S. has depleted something like 30 percent of the Tomahawk missile stock.

U.S. shot a decade of Tomahawk production in about three days. “Our munitions production rate and our stockpiles are at a dangerous level,” Brian Schimpf said. ” Anduril was launched in June 2017.

That same year Schimpf spent months in a California desert building the company’s first product, autonomous solar-powered surveillance devices called Sentry towers. Anduril’s first sale was the Sentry towers after a successful demonstration to the Department of Homeland Security in late September 2017.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection to autonomously monitor and surveil the border with AI, computer vision, radars and cameras. “I’ve been working on this problem for the better part of 20 years now,” Brian Schimpf said. He is a self-identified Democrat who fundraised for Joe Biden.

Anduril employee headcount has doubled annually over the past few years and currently exceeds 8,000. The company’s factories and test sites cost millions before a single missile launches. 2 billion in 2025.

The company is valued at $31 billion. Anduril’s presence at the West Texas site underscored the scale of its ambitions nine years after its founding, with Schimpf describing the vastness of such test locations as essential for developing weapons that can be blown apart, put back together and started anew.