Two years since Palmer Luckey exited Facebook’s Oculus in order to kick off a company that would build a virtual barrier on the border of the south; he is all set to become successful. In a fresh round of fundraising, his brand new venture called Anduril Industries garnered a current valuation of greater than $1 billion, as per people who are familiar with this matter.
According to these individuals who spoke under the clause of anonymity, the latest financing of Anduril includes capital contributed by Andreessen Horowitz. The details pertaining to this round are currently confidential. The technology of border control from Anduril includes towers equipped with cameras as well as infrared sensors which make use of artificial intelligence for tracking movement. The system has been deployed in Southern California and Texas. However, representatives from Andreessen Horowitz and Anduril didn’t give any comments regarding this story.
With the steady growth of Anduril, the company has been loading up when it comes to Facebook DNA. Andreessen Horowitz co-founder, Marc Andreessen is at the helm of the board of the social network, along with Peter Thiel. The latter’s Founders Fund had previously made investments in Anduril. The company was started by Luckey after he was fired in 2017 from Facebook amid controversy regarding his politically affiliated contributions as well as financial support provided to far-right organizations and trolls on the internet.
Oculus is a company that manufactures headsets of virtual reality and was acquired by Facebook in 2014. The company also received investments from Andreessen Horowitz. Luckey will be entering into the market of defense contracts which employees of certain major Silicon Valley companies have been rejecting. In 2018, Google refused to renew the Pentagon contract called Project Maven as a result of the petition signed by thousands of employees, requesting the CEO of the company Sundar Pichai for keeping Google away from the war business.
