Last week, Anduril and Palantir delivered the first Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN) — picture a tactical military truck designed to sweep up massive amounts of data from sensors in space, as well as across terrains and high altitudes — reaching the first major milestone in its $178 million contract with the U.S. Army. It was a big win for the primarily software company, which then brought on Anduril and Northrop Grumman, among other subcontractors, to help with some of the hardware elements.
Palantir won the hardware contract back in March after an extensive prototype design process against RTX, formally Raytheon. For context, Raytheon, one of the major defense primes, has a market cap of about $155 billion, dwarfing Palantir’s $66 billion as of writing and Anduril’s recent $14 billion valuation.
In March, Tom Keane, senior vice president of engineering at Anduril, promised Defense News that the Anduril-Palantir team would deliver the TITAN prototype in mere months. About four months later, the companies delivered.
Next up, soldiers will put the TITAN through an extensive testing process.
For Anduril, getting pulled on to the contract by Palantir is an example of a rising tide lifting all boats. Like Palantir, which got its start doing anti-terrorism software, Anduril was actually a software company first — it kicked off with surveillance tools for border control. The TITAN victory shows that defense tech startups, which often start in software, have a path to winning major contracts with hardware components.
“We might be the first software prime, but we don’t intend to be the only software prime,” Bryant Choung, senior vice president for defense at Palantir, told Breaking Defense back in March.
Anduril’s ambitions go beyond subcontracting; the company has been open about wanting to be the lead contractor on massive contracts. The startup is a final contender for the collaborative combat aircraft program, and told Breaking Defense last week that it would compete to be the prime contractor on an upcoming program designing a supersonic interceptor to take down cruise missiles.
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