Key points
- Anduril wins a 10-year Air Force research contract
- $50,000 obligated against an $85M ceiling
- The Air Force received eight offers
- Its CEO said in July he won't rush an IPO
Anduril Industries won a ten-year Air Force research contract with a ceiling of $85 million on Thursday. The Pentagon obligated $50,000 against it on the day of the award.
The program is called VOLARE, short for Digital System-Level Mission-Driven Integrated Design Methods for Aerospace Systems. The contract "provides research to enable a vehicle system design product and thermal management system design methodologies," according to the Sept. 17 contracts announcement. Work will be performed in Dayton, Ohio. It is expected to be completed by Sept. 17, 2036. The Air Force competed the award and received eight offers. The Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio is the contracting activity.
What $85 million means here
The award is an indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract, or IDIQ. An IDIQ is a purchasing channel, not a purchase. The government sets a ceiling, then buys against it through individual task orders over the life of the contract, and it is not obliged to reach the ceiling.
No money was placed on the basic contract. The first task order was funded with $50,000 of fiscal 2026 research and development money at the time of award, and the announcement describes that task order as incrementally funded. So the $85 million is the most the Air Force could spend with Anduril on VOLARE through 2036, not money already paid or guaranteed revenue. The same distinction applied when Dataminr took an Air Force contract worth up to $317.8 million in August.
What else the Pentagon bought the same day
Anduril's award sat on a page with the traditional primes. Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin (LMT) company, took $234.5 million to build 16 UH-60M Black Hawk helicopters. Boeing (BA) took $112.4 million to upgrade F-15 aircrew training equipment for Saudi Arabia. General Dynamics (GD) took two awards worth $47.6 million between them. Those are production and sustainment contracts with money obligated against them.
One other newer company appeared on the same page. Castelion, the long-range strike weapons startup founded by former SpaceX engineers, took a $16.37 million modification from the same Air Force Research Laboratory, bringing its contract to $37.23 million from $20.86 million. Other privately held defense companies have also received recent awards, among them Research Innovations and its Army award worth up to $99.5 million this month.
The IPO question
Anduril has no ticker and there is no way to buy it on an exchange. It has been named as an IPO candidate for most of two years, and the company keeps declining to set a date.
Chief Executive Brian Schimpf addressed it directly at the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley on July 9. "We define a successful IPO as our investors got a good return three years from actually going out," he told CNBC. "A bad time to do that is in the middle of a hype cycle. So we're not in a rush to go out." He said in the same interview that he was not sure the market was "particularly rational on the pricing right now." Sam Altman took a similar line when he ruled out an OpenAI listing this year.
The company has raised privately instead. It took in $5 billion in May at a $61 billion valuation, in a round led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, TechCrunch reported. Reuters reported on July 24 that it was in talks on a further round at about $100 billion, possibly in two stages. Anduril would not confirm that, and said anyone claiming knowledge of the terms, structure, pricing or timing "is speculating or misinformed." No public registration statement has been disclosed, and there is no share price range.
Anduril said its revenue more than doubled to $2.2 billion in 2025. A $100 billion valuation would place it above Northrop Grumman (NOC), worth $74 billion at Thursday's close, and above General Dynamics (GD) at $96 billion, while leaving it below Lockheed Martin at $124 billion.
What the award commits
The award gives the Air Force a way to order research from Anduril through 2036. How much business it produces will depend on future task orders and funding. For now, the disclosed commitment is $50,000 against an $85 million ceiling.
