All posts tagged: Palmer Luckey

US Army announces contract with Anduril worth up to B

US Army announces contract with Anduril worth up to $20B

Published by skeptic

The U.S. Army said late Friday that it has signed a 10-year contract with defense tech startup Anduril. The deal could be worth up to $20 billion. According to the announcement, the contract starts with a five-year “base period,” with the option to extend the deal for an additional five years, and it includes Anduril hardware, software, infrastructure, and services. The Army describes the agreement as a single enterprise contract consolidating what had been “more than 120 separate procurement actions for Anduril’s commercial solutions.”  “The modern battlefield is increasingly defined by software,” said Gabe Chiulli, the chief technology officer at the Department of Defense’s Office of the Chief Information Officer, in a statement. “To maintain our advantage, we must be able to acquire and deploy software capabilities with speed and efficiency,” Anduril was co-founded by Palmer Luckey, who was previously known for selling VR startup Oculus to Facebook (now Meta). Facebook fired Luckey after controversy erupted following a news report that he’d donated to a pro-Trump political group. Luckey has repeatedly insisted that the media …

Palmer Luckey’s retro gaming startup ModRetro reportedly seeks funding at B valuation

Palmer Luckey’s retro gaming startup ModRetro reportedly seeks funding at $1B valuation

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ModRetro, the vintage gaming startup by Palmer Luckey, is in talks to raise funding at a $1 billion valuation, according to the Financial Times. The company launched its first product, a Game Boy-style handheld device called the Chromatic, in 2024. The Verge’s Sean Hollister said it “might be the best version of the Game Boy ever made,” but found it hard to separate from Luckey’s reputation as founder of defense tech startup Anduril Industries. “If Lockheed Martin made a Game Boy, would you buy one?” Hollister asked. Luckey said last year that he’d been trying to build a Game Boy-inspired device “off and on as a hobby for almost seventeen years now” and described the Chromatic as the result of “hundreds of irrational decisions”  that made it “an uncompromisingly authentic celebration of everything that made the console special.” The FT reports that ModRetro is working on other devices, including one designed to replicate the Nintendo 64. Meanwhile, the Trump administration appears to have embraced Luckey’s vision for autonomous weapons, with Anduril reportedly in talks to …

Anduril has invented a wild new drone flying contest where jobs are the prize 

Anduril has invented a wild new drone flying contest where jobs are the prize 

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Palmer Luckey’s eyes light up, and he talks a mile a minute, when discussing his company’s new recruiting event: the AI Grand Prix.  This is a drone flying contest with a twist. Rather than humans operating drones, the drones must operate autonomously. The humans will be tested on their software-writing skills that cause the drones to outfly their competition.   There are prizes ranging from a $500,000 pot to be spilt amongst the highest-scoring teams, to jobs at Anduril, and a chance to bypass the company’s standard recruiting cycle.  “It was something that I decided we should do,” Anduril founder Luckey said in an interview with TechCrunch. Luckey and the team were meeting to discuss recruitment strategy, he recalled. Someone suggested sponsoring a drone racing tournament, which was somewhat in line with the company’s previous marketing tactics. For instance, Anduril sponsors the NASCAR Cup Series race known as the Anduril 250.  Luckey generally liked the idea but then said, “‘Guys, that would be a really dumb thing for Anduril to sponsor. The whole point, our entire impetus and reason for being, is this pitch that autonomy has finally …

Palmer Luckey’s retro gaming startup ModRetro reportedly seeks funding at B valuation

Palmer Luckey says the coolest thing about Anduril expanding to Long Beach is the fighter jets

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Defense tech company Anduril on Thursday announced its plans to expand its Southern California presence with a major campus in Long Beach, the coastal town where founder Palmer Luckey grew up. The expanded campus will eventually support about 5,500 jobs. Luckey told TechCrunch that these will be new jobs, not transfers from other operations. Anduril’s headquarters is nearby, in Costa Mesa, California, and it also has a massive manufacturing facility in Ohio. The Long Beach campus will span 1.18 million square feet across six buildings, combining office space and industrial areas dedicated to R&D. It is expected to be ready by mid-2027, the company said. Long Beach is “a major aerospace hub right in our backyard,” Luckey told TechCrunch about why the company chose that location. The plan is to hire similar types of employees to those working at headquarters: manufacturing workers, technicians, assembly workers, and engineers across disciplines (electrical, mechanical, aerodynamics), as well as build and test roles, and “a lot of people on the logistics side, because the things that we’re going to …