Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus and Anduril Industries, speaks during The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech Live conference in Laguna Beach, California on October 16, 2023.
Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images
Anduril Industries, Palmer Luckey’s defense-tech startup, will take over Microsoft‘s multibillion-dollar augmented reality headset program with the U.S. Army, the companies announced Tuesday.
The partnership still needs approval from the Department of Defense. If that goes through, Anduril would oversee “production, future development of hardware and software, and delivery timelines” for the U.S. Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System program, the companies said.
The IVAS program is intended to improve capabilities such as night vision for U.S. Army soldiers. Microsoft won a 10-year contract worth nearly $22 billion to build more than 120,000 custom HoloLens headsets for the Army back in 2021, but the company discontinued production of the device last year, according to reports. As part of the new agreement, Microsoft will continue to provide cloud and artificial intelligence capabilities for IVAS.
The hand off of the program comes at a key time for Anduril.
The startup has been in talks to raise up to $2.5 billion in funding at a $28 billion valuation, CNBC reported last week. Anduril also unveiled a partnership with OpenAI in December, and in January, the startup announced plans to invest roughly $1 billion into a manufacturing facility in Ohio.
Since its founding in 2017, Anduril has been working to shake up the defense contractor space currently dominated by Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Anduril has been a member of the CNBC Disruptor 50 list three times and ranked as No. 2 last year.
Luckey founded Anduril after his ousting from Facebook. He joined the social media company after co-founding Oculus VR, a virtual-reality startup that he sold to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014.
He was also one of the tech industry’s earliest vocal supporters of President Donald Trump. Luckey told CNBC in 2017 that he’s been on the “tech-for-Trump train for longer than just about anyone” and that the “need to be the strongest military in the world is really non-partisan.”
Luckey called Anduril’s IVAS partnership “deeply personal” and said everything in his career “has led to this moment.”
“IVAS isn’t just another product,” he wrote in a blog post. “It is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to redefine how technology supports those who serve.”
— CNBC’s Ari Levy and Morgan Brennan contributed reporting
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