Full Interview: Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf on $1B+ Revenue & Still Doubling

What is the growth

of Androl?

Recent funding valuing the company at more than $30,000,000,000. Androl is helping to build the military of the future.

So we're eight years ish in. We're at about 7,000 employees. We have consistently doubled revenue, like, every year. Over a billion, we're still doubling revenue. Nearly everything we're doing is around this future of a more disconnected, more autonomous battlefield.

Right? That's like a core part of the thesis we have. We've been able to build up a software platform, all the components you would need from sensors, from compute, from networking systems, like communications, all this stuff enables us to go really fast. Worldwide, we're in a period where things are just geopolitically more unstable. People like to talk about this, that we're in this time of peace, but it doesn't seem all that peaceful to me.

We set up this company, have an impact on the world, to change deterrents, to change what the trajectory of where defense was going. Feels like it is really happening now. Like, feels like we're at the scale and size that this is really moving the needle.

And you're creating a lot of financial momentum around it too with rumors of IPOs and fake SPVs. Yeah.

The fake SPVs are great. Everyone is slinging Andoril stock that they don't have. There are just a handful of these growth stage companies that are doing very well in an outrageously large market with incredible momentum and track record of success. We are one of those few companies. If the world is gonna need more of what we're doing, we are undervalued.

Brian, welcome to Sorcery.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for having me at Anderle.

Yeah. It's pretty cool campus. It's like tons of energy. Old LA Times printing press. It's like it's a very awesome space.

I've had so much fun interviewing each of the founders today, and I've asked, I think most of them, if not all of them, what their favorite product is. So let's start with that. What's your favorite product?

Right now, I am probably most excited about the autonomous fighter jet because it is pretty wild, pretty first of its class, and it's just like a big plane. Like, airplanes are cool.

But my opinion will probably change in about, like, four weeks, because we got a lot of really cool stuff going on. And so I wanna talk about the current state of Andoril's business. You've scaled a lot. So could we put some numbers behind that? What is what is the growth of Andoril?

Yeah. So we're eight years ish in. We're at about 7,000 employees. We have consistently doubled revenue like every year. Right?

So even like over a billion, we're still doubling revenue. And so we we have just massively ramped on the top line, number of employees, and then the number of products we've been able to field is just pretty unsurpassed. I mean, I think we're in just dozens of different fielded products, depending on how you count it, configurations, whatever else. But we've just been able to like show the ability to like rapidly get new capability out to the field quickly and that there's demand for it. We can make it go quick.

And so it's it's just really grown a lot faster than I anticipated. Like, I thought we'd be, you know, five, six years from now at this point, but just the pace that the customers have been excited about what we're doing, the the uptake, like, all of that has gone a lot faster than I would have thought. I think there's, like, macro reasons for that. There's, you know, execution reasons is a huge part of it. I think we build the right things at the right time.

But just the the somehow it continues to accelerate even beyond where we're at today.

How has the product line expanded and how do you how how does that get shaped? Like, what is the form there? Because you have land, aerospace

Mhmm.

Arsenal one.

Yep. C. C. We have electronic warfare, so all the jamming, all of those pieces. We're thinking cyber things, like it's all sorts of crazy stuff.

The the way we think about it is a couple of different things. So one, just natural progression of the company. We're gonna move up in the complexity and scale of what we can work on. So if early on, we were working on smaller drones, made sense for where we're at. You know, the capital to actually get there, the expertise you need to have, it's a solvable problem quite quickly.

We've moved up into just much more sophisticated capabilities. We're making low cost cruise missiles that fly hundreds of miles. We're making autonomous fighter jets. You know, like three years ago, weren't believable to make autonomous fighter jets. Now we're doing it.

And we're gonna have them be produced in a production facility in, like, months from now. So just the physical scale, the complexity, everything we're doing, we're able to mount harder and harder things. You know, it reminds me of like, you know, the Tesla progression through, you know, like a hand built Roadster that was limited edition, you know, through to increasing sophistication on production design, all these pieces. So you're have that angle. Then the other piece of this is what is believably gonna be a good big enough business to justify us being into.

That bar has raised over time, like the scale of the business we need to go after has gone up. But the parts that have held true are, you know, we've got to be able to see real adoption within like three to five years. Right? We're not working on things that are ten years out. That's just not where we're at.

We've got to see the ability to get real traction in in the next few years. We got to have like a technical edge of like why would we be able to do this better? Either on production, on software, on hardware. What is the insight we have? And the government's got to want to buy it.

Right? At the end of the day, we don't have that many customers, and they've gotta be at a point in their life cycle where they're investing in this type of capability now. So you could have made small drones ten years ago and tried to sell them to the government. A lot of people did. Not that many of those businesses are around anymore because the government was not ready to move out at any meaningful scale at that time.

And so really getting that market timing right is probably the most important part for us where we have conviction this can actually go because we've got the business intuition, the technology, you know, the customer's ready that this is gonna pay out in like next three to five years. So that's kinda how we always assess it. The other through line with this is we're not gonna work on stuff that we don't believe is relevant for the future of where the military is going. You can chase kind of nonsensical, you know, products that don't have longevity to it, that aren't actually fit for purpose. Maybe you can make some money off of it for like a few years.

But if you're not actually aligned to where the government's going to be, where the military is gonna be ten years from now, it's not gonna work out. So everything we're doing, are constantly validating this is something that would actually be dominant in the long term. This actually makes sense to integrate into the military. And if you if you're right on that, it tends to work out in the long run. Right?

It may not work out immediately, but over the long run, you will be successful.

And you're also doing it with very competitive efficiencies against competitors and primes.

Yeah. I mean, I I often think we're you know, it's like, are we as good as we would like to be in terms of, like, beating the best commercial companies and getting things out to market? You know, not always, but you know what? Defense is a very unique world where you're gonna build a lot of different products at relatively low volumes. Like, that's actually a very strange world to live in.

That's like a core part of the thesis we have. So we've been able to build up a software platform, all the components you would need from sensors, from compute, from networking systems, like communications, all this stuff that is enables us to go really fast when we get on to a new capability. So we're not inventing all the software from scratch, not inventing all the hardware from scratch. We've got this toolkit and baseline that we refine and build on over time. So this enables us again, if you live in this world where you're gonna have a lot of products and you're gonna have to field them fast and you're gonna have to mature them fast, it's the only strategy that's gonna work.

You've gotta keep this sort of recipe, this toolkit of components that you can bring to bear very, very fast. And then you need the software to time altogether, and that's Lattice for us, that core software that makes everything smart and work together. So we've taken a strategy that's quite different than what a lot of the traditional players have done. Right? That's expensive.

That's hard. It takes a lot of conviction that you're building the right things. You gotta get it right. There's no, like, short term feedback on it. You just gotta have belief of where this is gonna go and invest in it.

How do you price the products?

Yeah. So highest level, our view should be these should be cheaper. Right? Like, we're working on something, we should be coming in at a fraction of the cost of the alternative approaches. We can get there through, you know, the fact that we're using commercial off the shelf components or things we've invested in, cheaper production processes, and really just design it with cost in mind.

Like so that that that's kind of a baseline we start with. But, yeah, pricing with the government is a mess. Like, it's incredibly complicated. There's a huge art to it. Sometimes they wanna see your cost and your price reasonable.

Sometimes they'll just use other price justification. It it really is all over the pry place how you actually sort of allowed to price these things intelligently. But our view of this is you should get to a rational place that every other industry has gotten to, which is we would prefer to work on things where we charge a fixed price and there's a, you know, kind of a sustaining fee to this. Right? Like I'm paying year over year for upgrades and everything else.

And that's how the software gets better. It's how your systems get better. It's a very rational win win outcome. And we also like models where if it doesn't work, we don't get paid. It's a controversial position in the government.

But we really prefer models that hold us accountable to delivery. Just makes us a better company and the government gets a better outcome. So we always try to find these ways to take more of the risk, to be more accountable. That that works really well for us. And I think it's a win win scenario versus traditional approach where it's like the government took all the risk and you get a fixed profit fee.

That's a disaster. Like, everything just gets more complex and more expensive. It doesn't work out.

Secretary Hagsef was just here. Mhmm. Had a big visit.

Yeah.

And he was also just at the Reagan National Defense Forum. I'm curious from the visit and then also his remarks at the forum. How do you now view this kind of like new world of war? And do you think it's being embraced in a way that it wasn't before?

The the main change he's driving at is when you look at the industrial base, the ability to produce and the ability to get new capabilities out quickly is one of the most determinative aspects you can have as a defense department. Right? It's a war department. And that's not where we're at. Right?

Like, we've had a strategy for generations, which has been the decades long technological edge is how we win. Right? And The US invested more, had better engineers, and capitalized it more efficiently to, like, get to that massive technological edge. And there is still a dimension of that for sure. But increasingly, the ability to produce at scale in a way you can afford, the ability to innovate fast on the software to rapidly adapt these capabilities, that's going to be the determinative characteristic.

Right? We see this in Ukraine. We kinda see this across the board. So everything he's trying to align around is this idea of how do we get capabilities out faster to the force in a way that is affordable and effective. Right?

And companies that can work in that world, great. Companies that can't, you're gonna die. And I think that's a healthy view. What he's not saying, and I and I think because the reality is is there is a mix, is some of the stuff is gonna look like autonomous systems, but it's not all gonna be. Right?

There's still gonna be a place for, you know, aircraft carriers and all these things, but the balance is gonna shift. And there's these new class of capabilities that aren't really relevant, that can be more cost effective, that you can produce at scale, That's gonna be a key aspect of what we do in the future. And so the focus is really on industry that can perform, setting up incentives for performance, and setting up the whole acquisition system around speed. Where prior, it was entirely set up around, we just need the most expensive capabilities at any time at any cost, and that's that's not the world we're in anymore.

Do you think the nearly trillion dollar budget is reasonable or unreasonable given the amount of efficiencies and technological advancements that we have? And maybe for people that don't understand how it's being allocated, could you also share that?

Yeah. So the so there's borderline trillion dollar defense budget, and everyone thinks it's like we're buying a billion dollars of kit every year. Well, that's not true. Right? I forget the actual percentages, but it's, you know, more than half goes to personnel costs, to facilities, to military construction.

So you just have an outrageous percentage going to these, you know, kind of fixed costs that you have that are not next generation technology. And then there's an outrageous cost as well then to sustaining the legacy technologies you have bought. So maintaining aircraft, maintaining ships. These are huge bills. Right?

That is significantly higher than the amount that's spent on procurement. And when you look at this in terms of historic terms, the procurement budget as a percentage of GDP, for example, is I think the lowest it's ever been. And so we're we're not spending money on the new technology. We're spending money on sustaining the low the old technology. We're spending money on all the infrastructure that we have to have a global military, and that is that is very expensive.

So now you're really talking about how do I get efficiency out of, you know, call it the 30% of the budget that I you know, you're you're actually maneuvering around. And in that world, you know, there's a good argument, which is we could be spending that money a lot more efficiently. I think that is true. It's hard to argue we couldn't. How much more efficiently?

I don't know. But, I tend to think we can get a lot more bang for our buck on weapons, on aircraft, probably two x from where we are by just looking at a different mix of these things. But the hard part is we got to transition to that world. Right? So we're we're not we can't just jump to that and say, you know, all of a sudden we're gonna abandon all of our, you know, man's surface combatants and move to this autonomous future or something like that.

Like, that's that's just not believable. So we're gonna have to go through this transition, which is sort of always true of how do we responsibly cycle out the old, think about what's still fit for purpose or not, and then get the new systems in place. That will cost more for a period of time. Right? And and that is a a hard world to live in.

And so I I don't see a world where, like, the defense budgets could magically shrink and we still have the military that we need to have. But I do think these things can be done wildly more efficiently than they ever have in the past.

Sorcery is brought to you by Brex, the financial stack trusted by more than 30,000 companies, including one in three venture backed startups in The US. Nearly 40% of startups fail because they run out of cash. Is literally built to help founders avoid that. Unlike traditional banks that let your money sit idle, chipping away at it with fees, is designed to help you spend smarter and move faster. Their all in one solution combines checking, treasury, and FDIC protection into one powerful account.

You can send and receive money globally at lightning speeds, get 20 times the standard FDIC coverage through their partner banks, and even high yield from day one. With same day and even same hour liquidity, access your funds anytime. Companies like Scale AI, DoorDash, Service Titan, HIMS, Anthropic, Flexport, Robinhood, and Plaid trust and use Brex.

Start today at brex.com/sorcery. That's brex.com/sorcery. In today's high speed business world, staying ahead means using the smartest tools possible, including the powerful capabilities of artificial intelligence. Meet Turing builds customizable AI systems designed to solve your mission critical challenges no matter your industry. From expert guidance to tailored projects, Turing helps top companies realize AI that's more capable, more adaptable, and more effective.

With Turing, discover how AI can accelerate your business growth. To learn more, visit turing.com/sorcery, spelled sourcery. That's turing.com/sorcery.

I wanna talk about Andoril's expansion. You have a global expansion, whether it's the facility in Australia or the new deal with Edge and The UAE.

Yep.

Let's maybe start with Australia and building out GhostShark there. Yeah. What was that process like?

Australia is a great example. So setting the context maybe a little broadly, worldwide, we're in a period where things are just geopolitically more unstable. People like to talk about this, that we're in this time of peace, but it doesn't seem all that peaceful to me. We've got a land war in Europe. The Red Sea is still, you know, intermittently shut down.

Israel and Iran going at it. You've got China doing constant aggression on The Philippines and the South China Sea. Cambodia and Thailand are sparring all the time right now. India, Pakistan doing air wars and doing, you know, it's like air combat. I'm probably forgetting several of these going on right now.

And so we're not in a time of peace. Right? Like, this is not a stable time. And so something has changed. Right?

Like, there's a sense that a lot of historic grievances, the political opportunism to use violence to get to your ends that has changed. And every nation's reflecting it, where they're increasing defense spending. They're ramping up their own defense. And I think the view of what The US is going to do or not do on everyone's behalf has shifted. I think The US reasonably is saying, we're not gonna go fight everyone else's wars.

We're gonna expect every nation to provide for their own defense. But that also does not imply The US is backing away as the sort of security guarantor for the world. Right? Like, we still have the only blue water navy in at scale that is able to project force anywhere in sort of multiple parts of the globe all the time. Can guarantee international shipping and stability of the seas.

There's all these things we're still going to do as America that are very aligned to our interests and aligned to the the the system that we have. So that's the whole backdrop that's going on. There's a whole lot of other pieces to this. Nations are increasing their budgets. The security situation is deteriorating, and, you know, The US's role is is is shifting in in a lot of this.

And on top of it, the backlogs on, like, you wanna order Patriot missiles. I'm hearing right now the latest number someone told me over the weekend was fifteen years to get a new Patriot system. Like, what does that even mean? Like, I have no idea what that means. Right?

But it's like, call it even five to seven for a backlog. Like, this is crazy. So The US isn't a dependable producer anymore. Can't get the weapons in time. This has resulted in basically every country looking a little bit differently in how they're gonna think about well, when they are ramping spending, what does that mean, and what do they want to be true?

They're all gonna look at a question of, if we're gonna spend a lot of money, we should get some economic benefit. But probably more importantly, we need to have assured supply. We need to know that if we order this, this shows up, and that we want to shape our military for what we need it to be for our regional challenges. Australia is a great example of this. They shut down their French submarine program.

They're going, you know, all in on The US nuclear submarine programs. That's not going to show up for till 2035. So this major gap of about a decade where their old technology was phasing out, and they were waiting on this next generation capability to come in. We went and pitched them on this idea of you could build these extra large autonomous underwater vehicles. You can build them fast.

And we did this model of splitting the development fifty fifty. They had skin of the game. We did two. And we ended up executing that program incredibly quickly. And to their credit, they saw the opportunity and said yes, basically, immediately.

They said yes in just a couple of months, and we were signed in under contract. And we were able to deliver at pace. We build out a Australian engineering team. We built out an Australian production facility. We have our first production GoShark already ran came off the production line, then I think thirty days of signing the production contract.

So just an incredibly fast pace that shows what you can actually do if you just hit go on this. And we wanna replicate that model in a number of other countries. It's not gonna look all the same. Right? There's not that many places that will do, you know, fully ground up capabilities.

But this idea of integrating into their military, helping them think about ways they can use technology to modernize, do warfare differently, and understanding a more nuanced approach to how they're gonna get local engineering and local production that fits while still being aligned with The US, which is still again the backstop of world security. Everyone needs that US alliance. And so this is just a very nuanced complicated thing to actually solve for, but the numbers are pretty clear. Europe is gonna spend something like four times the amount of procurement that The US is over the next five years. Like, it's a massive buildup.

Japan's gonna substantially increase their budget. Taiwan's increasing their budget. Australia, Like, everyone is ramping. So that problem I talked about with The US having so much in sustainment and keeping the legacy going, so the countries won't have that problem as much. They have an opportunity to build new and build efficiently and something we very much wanna help them with.

How do we increase manufacturing capacity?

Inside The US? Yeah. Manufacturing capacity in The US is, I think, actually quite solvable. So there's things that we we have a lot of capacity. Right?

Like, there's a lot of automotive production. There is a lot of industrial production. What I think has gone wrong on defense production is we viewed it as this Galapagos island of industry where we said, cutting you off from everything else, all the learnings in the commercial world, and you're gonna evolve on your own. And that was a disaster. Right?

It was its own requirements, its own industrial base. It's quite separate. But that was didn't have to be true. Right? In World War two, we didn't design airplanes we wish could be produced.

We designed airplanes that could be produced. We designed jeeps and tanks that could be produced in the processes, in the industrial capacity that we had. And designing with that in mind, when you know from the beginning you're gonna have to design this for rate, you're gonna have to design this to scale, Well, you start with the question of how would I manufacture it. That is a lens you take. What we asked industry to do for nearly the last forty years was how could you design the most high end Swiss watch of a weapon or an airplane?

We just had capability at any price. And we're shocked to find out that you can't mass produce Swiss watches. It's like crazy. It's just not how this works. Right?

Like, have to tie it to the scaled industrial capacity that exists. It's always gonna be defense exotic stuff. Like, there isn't a lot of commercial market for solid rocket motors and explosive warheads, but those are then now you're down to a solvable set of problems. So we've really looked at this question of how do you design this first and foremost to tap into scale. Once you're there, then okay.

Do is there enough composites capacity or printed circuit board capacity in The US or CNC shops? The answer is absolutely yes. There is definitely enough capacity. But then you get to the problems that defense can't solve. And this is the rare earths, the germaniums, the magnets, all these different issues.

And then you get to semiconductors. These are national policy issues. You have to solve this at a commercially viable level, not at a defense specific level. It will always then be too expensive and unproducible if you just have a defense exquisite magnet factory. Like, that doesn't work.

You need a commercially viable magnet factory that defense uses, that is in US or allied territory that you have faith in. Right? And these are industrial policy things that now, for the first time in decades, we've, you know, taken honestly the fact that China wasn't playing the free trade game that we were playing, that they were using their state power to create dependence on their supply chains, and that this is a problem, that we do not have the resilience we actually need for defense, but even just trade negotiations. We saw how it played out. Now imagine we wanted to put economic sanctions on them if they were doing something nefarious.

No one would get iPhones. No one would get cars. Like, it completely hamstrings our ability to act independently as a nation to just basically penalize bad behavior. We just lose all that leverage. So this has to be a lens that as a country we take, and it's a different world.

It will make people uncomfortable. It will take time to figure out how to do it, but that is a critical national policy issue that has to be addressed.

So you started off as an engineer at Palantir, and now you're the CEO of Anderol. What is the biggest lesson that you learned, and how has that shaped your leadership?

The biggest lesson from Palantir was really this focus on talent, which often can be everyone says it. In practice, it's a lot more annoying than you would think. And because often the talented people, just super opinionated, they're kind of aggressive, they tell you you're dumb. Like, it it doesn't always feel good, and it it just feels a little chaotic and high entropy. But this was, like, the beauty that I think Carp really recognized and drove at Palantir, which was this notion of, let's just have really brilliant people that are highly empowered to own problems.

It's probably the number one lesson in, like, how we run things here or, you know, what I've seen really work is often middle management and, like, these companies that scale, they get so locked into the system and stability that they they think they're getting talent, but they're not getting creative talent. They're getting talent that is good as optimizing the system as it exists. But the world changes, things get hard, you got to adapt, and you just crush out all of that talent in your organization. With Andrew, we are constantly inventing new products. We're moving into, like, totally gnarly hard political and geopolitical questions, and, like, how do we thread these, you know, different strategies.

We're working on new forms of war fighting. That just requires constant creativity. If you don't have these just brilliant people and give them space to actually do what they need to do and have the right ideas, it doesn't really work. And so that that's the number one thing that I I I think I really learned along the way that is probably one of the more nonobvious pieces that I think most people get wrong.

Artistry and meritocracy.

Artistry and meritocracy. There you go.

So as we wrap up, what are you most looking forward to with Andoril?

The next few years are gonna see us somehow, it's just gonna continue to accelerate. I didn't think it was possible. But because we've been successful, we're getting pulled into bigger and harder and crazier problems. And so over the next few years, we are going to become so involved in nearly every aspect of US and international defense in a way that I think is going to be very positive for us, very positive for the world. But just the sheer scale and breadth that we will be operating at, that is extremely exciting for me.

I I just think we set up this company to have an impact on the world, to change deterrents, to change what the trajectory of where defense was going. It feels like it is really happening now. Like, feels it like we're at the scale and size that this is really moving the needle. And that that is very exciting for me.

Sorcery is proudly sponsored by Carta. Carta is transforming the private marketplace, connecting founders, investors, and limited partners through software purpose built for private capital. Trusted by more than 65,000 companies in over 160 countries, Carta's platform of software and services lays the groundwork so you can build, invest, and scale with confidence. Carta's fund administration platform supports over 9,000 funds and SPVs, representing nearly $185,000,000,000 in assets under management, with tools designed to enhance the strategic impact of fund CFOs. For more information, visit carta.com/sorcery.

That's carta.com/sourcery.

Some of you may not have heard this yet, but our sponsor Public just launched something called Generated Assets, and it brings AI into investing in a way I've honestly never seen before. Here's how it works: You type in an idea like AI powered supply chain companies with positive free cash flow or defense tech companies growing revenue over 25% year over year. Publix AI then dispatches a swarm of agents that scan every single US stock, evaluates them, and instantly builds a custom index around your thesis. What really stands out is how clearly it explains why each stock is included. And before you invest, you can even backtest your idea against the S and P 500, so you're making decisions with real context, not just guessing.

And beyond generated assets, Public lets you invest in stocks, bonds, options, crypto all in one place. They'll even give you an uncapped 1% match when you transfer your investments over from another platform. If you wanna build a portfolio that actually reflects your thesis, visit public.com/sorcery, paid for by Public Investing. Full disclosures in the description. And you're creating a lot of financial momentum around it too with rumors of IPOs and fake SPVs.

Yeah.

The fake SPVs are great. If is everyone is slinging Andoril stock that they don't have. My take on this is there are just a handful of these growth stage companies that are doing very well in an outrageously large, you know, market with incredible momentum and track record of success. We are one of those few companies that are still private. Right?

And that creates a ton of demand and interest, and it's a good problem. Means we just have unlimited capital to go grow as fast as we need to. It's a great spot to be.

I don't know if it's the AI hype bubble, but all these massive valuations make me believe that Andriel is incredibly undervalued. What do you think?

I always think we're undervalued. There's another lesson I learned from Carp. You're always undervalued. But it really just boils down to if you think we're gonna continue to grow and the world is gonna need more of what we're doing, we are undervalued. If somehow you think the world is gonna say, no.

We're stopping and we're going back to the old old world, then we're probably overvalued. But I'd put my money and most of our investors put their money on the world needs more and or not less. That seems very likely to be true.

Lovely place to end. Thank you so much, Brian.

Awesome. Thank you.

Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email, and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today, and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.