Right now, private market trading platforms are experiencing an odd phenomenon. Anduril shares are quoted at about $94 by Forge and Notice, suggesting a current valuation of more than $89 billion. That is about three times the $30.5 billion price tag that was officially set during the company’s March 2025 Series G round. In order to gain exposure, buyers must pay premiums of up to 40%, and even at that markup, demand continues to exceed supply. That’s a remarkable situation for a company that doesn’t file 10-Qs, doesn’t trade on any public exchange, and won’t even confirm its IPO timeline.
Palmer Luckey, the man behind Oculus VR, along with Trae Stephens, Brian Schimpf, Matt Grimm, and Joe Chen, founded Anduril Industries in 2017. The pitch was different from what defense investors were accustomed to from the outset. Anduril chose to build first and sell later rather than wait for lengthy government contracts and cost-plus accounting. Venture capital was used to finance development, and Silicon Valley’s engineering culture was applied to hardware that had previously moved at Pentagon speed. Drones, sensors, and command software are all integrated into their core platform, Lattice, so that operators can use it without three weeks of training. And it works well enough that the U.S. Army handed them oversight of the $22 billion IVAS augmented reality headset program — a contract Microsoft was supposed to deliver and quietly stepped away from in early 2025.
Defense analysts typically don’t see the growth chart. From $8.5 billion in 2022 to $14 billion in August 2024 to $30.5 billion in June 2025 following a $2.5 billion Founders Fund-led Series G round. According to some accounts, that round was eight times oversubscribed. The largest single investment in Founders Fund’s history was a $1 billion check. Although Anduril doesn’t disclose official figures, revenue is said to have doubled to about $1 billion in 2024. Institutional investors believe the company is headed in a direction that, in contrast, makes traditional primes like Northrop, L3Harris, and even Lockheed appear capital-heavy and slow-moving.
You can get a close-up look at scale by strolling past the Arsenal-1 site in Ohio. Five million square feet. An investment of about $1 billion. When production begins in July, more than 4,000 jobs are anticipated. Last August, Anduril established the first new solid rocket motor manufacturing facility in the United States in fifty years in Mississippi. Together with Northrop and L3Harris, they are currently ranked as the third SRM supplier in the nation. They and the UAE’s EDGE Group have inked a joint venture. To bring the production of cooled-IR cameras in-house, they purchased American Infrared Solutions. Real metal, real production tonnage, and a real factory are all present. The website is more than just a software pitch with the Pentagon logo.
The problem is that none of this is likely to be available for purchase. Through its own investor relations page, Anduril, a privately held company, has made unusually public warnings to retail investors about fraudulent forward contracts, scams, and unauthorized funds that purport to grant access. The company notes that outright transfer restrictions and rights of first refusal apply to nearly all employee shares. Anduril intends to enforce those rights vigorously, which has put a chill on some of the secondary market schemes that have sprung up around prominent late-stage startups. It’s hard not to notice the contrast — a company aggressively defending its cap table while retail investors on Reddit ask, slightly desperately, when they’ll get their shot.
Palmer Luckey has said an IPO is “definitely” on the roadmap, and 2026 has been floated, though nothing is confirmed. The Motley Fool’s coverage suggests 2026 or later, and most credible reporting treats the timing as genuinely undetermined. Investors looking for proxy exposure have turned to publicly traded names like Lockheed Martin, L3Harris, AeroVironment, and Kraken Robotics — the latter supplying batteries and sonar for Anduril’s Ghost Shark underwater drones. Defense ETFs offer broader sector coverage, but none of them really capture what makes Anduril unusual.
Watching this unfold, you get the feeling that the IPO, when it comes, will be one of the most-watched defense listings since Lockheed. Whether the public market accepts an $89 billion valuation, or trims it back to something closer to the last official round, will depend on macro conditions, geopolitical risk, and whether Anduril keeps converting Pentagon ambition into delivered hardware. For now, anyone outside the accredited-investor universe is left watching the Forge and Notice numbers tick higher, hoping the eventual S-1 filing arrives before the premium grows any wider.
