Anduril HQ
One of Anduril’s sentry towers stands tall at the company’s HQ in California’s Orange County. (Anduril Photo)

Irvine, Calif.-based Anduril Industries says it’s opening a new office in Seattle and will be hiring engineers to work on defense technologies.

“We are building bigger and better systems for our military as quickly as we can,” Palmer Luckey, the venture’s founder, said in a news release. “The incredible pool of talent in the Seattle area helps us accelerate that.”

Founded in 2017, Anduril develops hardware and software centered around Lattice, an AI backbone allowing for real-time information analysis across the company’s range of products. Those products include a surveillance drone called the Ghost, an interceptor drone called the Anvil, medical transport drones and a border monitoring system that relies on sensor-equipped sentry towers.

Anduril’s customers include the U.S. Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security and the British Ministry of Defense. The company currently has nearly 200 employees at its Irvine headquarters and a Washington, D.C., office.

“We are already building capacity for the Seattle office with seven recent hires, and aim to grow to 25 by the end of 2021,” Brian Schimpf, Anduril’s CEO and co-founder, told GeekWire in response to emailed questions.

“Seattle is one of the top tier areas for technology talent in the U.S., with a high concentration of people who can develop the next generation of defense solutions,” Schimpf said. “Because of the city’s long history of working with the Department of Defense, there is a deep understanding of why it’s important to apply technological innovation to national security.”

Schimpf said Anduril’s products could help authorities deal with impacts of the coronavirus outbreak

“We do see our AI products as a way to facilitate better operations during a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic,” he told GeekWire via email. “The tools that we make with artificial intelligence are designed to help people and machines work together to accomplish important tasks. In many cases that can reduce the number of people that need to be deployed into the field at any given time. … That can make it easier to keep things running when forces are dispersed over greater distances, or in situations like now with the coronavirus.”

Last September, Anduril reportedly raised $127 million in a funding round that was said to push its valuation into unicorn territory, past the $1 billion mark. There’s been some controversy along the way: Luckey founded Anduril after being fired from Facebook — by some accounts, due to his politics; by other accounts, due to the outcome of an intellectual property dispute.

Update for 2:20 p.m. PT May 12: We’ve added Brian Schimpf’s emailed comments.

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