Silicon Valley has changed everything, even the way we go to war.

Silicon Valley has changed everything, even the way we go to war. This is part four in our series explaining the tech and business behind the most valuable private tech companies. The Anduril founder, Palmer Luckey, is storied. At just 20, he sold his VR headset company, Oculus, to Facebook for $2 billion. Two years later, he was fired by Zuckerberg and partnered up with Trae Stephens from Founders Fund to build a defense startup they likened to Stark Industries from Iron Man. The name Anduril comes from Aragorn's sword in Lord of the Rings and means "Flame of the West." They aimed to turn the defense business on its head. Traditionally, it's built to spec, and it works like this. The government puts out a proposal, big contractors, Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, bid on it. The winner gets paid up front, and then the product is built. Instead, Anduril flipped it. They call their approach built to mission, where they take on R&D risk, build working systems using their own VC dollars, and then sell finished products off the shelf to the government. Their technology is software-defined, hardware-enabled. At the core, there's Lattice, a software product that's like a brain, and all their hardware products run on it. Those include Sentry Tower, their first product, a foldable, portable, solar-powered surveillance tower. UAVs, like Ghost Drone, a near-silent autonomous helicopter, and Roadrunner, described as somewhere between a drone and a missile, designed to take down incoming threats and land itself. Fury, a new unmanned fighter jet that will soon fly alongside the U.S. Air Force, and IVAS, an AR headset for the U.S. Army. This one was kind of full circle for Luckey because it's close to his VR roots, and it was a contract Anduril recently won away from Microsoft. Anduril has raised 6.26 billion from VCs, including Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, and Thrive. The company is valued at 30.5 billion, 14 times revenue, not profitable until 2030. Anduril's business is naturally divisive, given the nature of their products. There are kind of two camps: Anduril and their investors, who believe that avoiding defense products is both a moral failure and a missed market opportunity, and those who think letting for-profit companies set the defense product suite sets a risky precedent. Either way, in only seven years, Anduril has built the most important defense contractor in America by building weapons like Silicon Valley software. Which company on this list do you want to see unpacked next?