Defense startup Anduril clinched a $642 million contract on Friday to help the US Marine Corps fight smaller drones at its bases.
Anduril’s new deal is for the Marine Corps Installation-Counter small Unmanned Aircraft Systems program, which is essentially a network of anti-drone defenses for bases and facilities.
The announcement comes after Anduril scored a separate five-year $200 million agreement in November to bring counter-drone tech to the Marine Air Defense Integrated System. This mobile air defense system can be mounted on vehicles like Humvees.
Like with the MADIS, Anduril’s offering for this new contract is to fight smaller drones, which the US military classifies as Group 1 and Group 2.
Such drones are typically no heavier than 55 pounds and fly at a maximum altitude of about 3,500 feet, like the exploding commercial drones used in the war in Ukraine.
When the Corps first opened its contract in April 2024, it warned of a “security capability gap” for dealing with these smaller drones at its bases.
“The sUAS threat poses unique challenges to military installations when compared to those of operational forces,” the Corps wrote.
The Defense Department said on Friday that 10 companies had submitted proposals for the contract.
With Anduril scoring the deal, the department said that 80% of the work until 2035 would be done in Costa Mesa, California, home to Anduril’s headquarters. The rest is expected to be performed in Washington, D.C., and other Marine Corps facilities.
The announcement did not specify what type of product or how many systems Anduril will deliver.
Press teams for Anduril and the Marine Corps did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider outside regular business hours.
One of Anduril’s main offerings for fighting smaller drones, Anvil, features a quadcopter that flies out from a portable storage box to track and crash into enemy systems. It can also be fitted with explosives to attack bigger targets.
Additionally, the company sells electronic warfare jammers called Pulsar, which it’s already providing to the Pentagon as part of a $250 million deal from October.
Anduril, founded in 2017 by Oculus creator Palmer Luckey, has become a rising star in the defense industry as it emphasizes ready-made designs that can be produced at scale. In that sense, it hopes to reuse the same design to bid for multiple contracts instead of creating each one specifically for a single deal.
The firm is also working with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and runs its products on an AI software called Lattice to survey the battlefield and identify threats.
One of its biggest scores so far is a $22 billion contract with the US Army to provide soldiers with mixed-reality goggles. The contract was originally awarded to Microsoft but later ceded to Anduril.
The firm hopes to expand quickly. In August, Anduril raised $1.5 billion to build a 5 million-square-foot factory in Ohio that it said would “hyperscale” production.
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