Anduril's Series G round and more venture moves to highlight

Anduril

Now the poster child for defense tech startup success, Anduril is looking to do even more for national security agencies with its newly fetched $2.5 billion in Series G capital.

Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund wrote the largest check in its history at $1 billion and led the round, Anduril chairman and co-founder Trae Stephens told Bloomberg TV on Thursday at the publication’s tech summit in San Francisco. Founders Fund also led Anduril’s $1.5 billion Series F round that closed in August.

Anduril now touts a valuation of $30.5 billion, but the eight-year-old company is almost certainly heading toward a major checkpoint for what to do the next time it needs to get new investments.

Stephens told Bloomberg that while a public listing of Anduril is not on the immediate horizon, the long-term belief is that “Anduril is the shape of a publicly traded company.”

Palmer Luckey, also an Anduril founder and its chief executive, did not detail the timeline of an initial public offering when he spoke with CNBC on Tuesday. But an eventual public listing is certain and necessary to push for larger contracts, as he sees it.

ConductorAI

Two months on from its $15 million Series A close, this maker of software to automate approval and review workflows has added Booz Allen Hamilton’s venture arm to the network of investors.

ConductorAI designs its Conduit platform to aid in document-based policy approvals such as foreign disclosure reviews and compliance tasks, primarily by leaning on large language models and agentic artificial intelligence.

Founded in 2023, the company touts the product as in use at civilian and Defense Department agencies under pilot programs. Some of the named users include the Air Force, Space Force and DOD’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office.

For Booz Allen Ventures, the idea behind its investment is to help ConductorAI further scale out its product from those pilot engagements.

Lux Capital led the Series A round with participation from Altman Capital, Haystack Ventures, Sunflower Capital, Humba Ventures, Also Capital, Forward Deployed VC and Abstract.

Nooks

This company opened for business in 2020 and describes its specialty as “Classified-Infrastructure-as-a-Service,” which is meant to be a more flexible method of accessing secured facilities.

As this article from KRDO-TV in Colorado Springs explains, Nooks offers government and industry clients access to those so-called SCIF spaces under a shared workspace model.

Nooks has caught the attention of the venture arms of Lockheed Martin and Science Applications International Corp., which participated in a $25 million Series A funding round alongside Zigg Capital and Upper90.

Startups and small businesses could likely benefit from what Nooks provides. Having one’s own sensitive compartmented information facilities are a requirement for bidding on many government contracts, and therefore an investment.

Nooks has gotten some government support through a Strategic Funding Increase program and Prospero, a contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency focused on developing a secure facility design tool.

Phoenix Semiconductor

Computer chips make the world go ‘round, including several types that are no longer in production but are still needed to keep large capital investments in use.

Phoenix Semiconductor opened for business in 2023 to push a new process for creating drop-in replacement chips without relying on new silicon, a fab or even original wafers. The idea is to support a long-cycle market that demands a high mix of parts at lower volumes.

The company has caught the attention of others through its $5.5 million seed funding round, which was led by J2 Ventures and RTX’s venture capital arm. Follow-on investments for this round came from IronGate Capital Advisors and Lockheed Martin’s VC arm.

Defense systems makers like Lockheed and RTX need access to replacement chips for their programs of record, which often rely on obsolete semiconductors that are multiple generations behind today’s offering.

Phoenix Semicondutor has also stood up a new board of directors to guide the company as it moves toward more scaled production. The panel includes CEO Ryan Hatcher, J2 Ventures Managing Partner Jonathan Bronson and former Mercury Systems Chief Operating Officer Didier Thibaud.

Quantum Space

Founded in 2022, this startup is pushing to develop spacecraft that can operate in geosynchronous and cislunar orbits with national security a priority market.

Quantum Space already fetched $17 million in Series A capital and has now added a $40 million extension on top of that. Prime Movers Lab, And Ventures, Sporos Capital and 1802 Ventures are among the participants in this round.

The immediate priority for Quantum Space is to fund the further development of Ranger, a spacecraft the company touts as having a maneuver-first design and being able to support future initiatives like the Golden Dome missile defense shield.

Hires of additional engineering talent are also on the agenda, as is positioning for major defense contracts and opportunities to extend the life of spacecraft.

The Series A extension follows Quantum Space’s May announcement that it hired Richard Matlock, a former Missile Defense Agency program executive, as senior vice president for national security space programs.