Palantir and SpaceX enabled Anduril
Scott Sanders, chief growth officer at Forterra, on the defense tech startup playbook
This marks the moment defense tech stopped being a one company exception and became a repeatable startup playbook. SpaceX and Palantir proved a venture backed company could force open closed procurement channels, self fund product, and still win. Anduril then turned that precedent into a faster model, shipping hardware and software early, winning a $12.5M Marine Corps contract about a year after founding, and showing later startups that the Pentagon could buy startup built systems at scale.
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The core precedent was legal and procedural, not legislative. Palantir won a 2016 court ruling that forced the Army to seriously consider commercial software for DCGS-A, and SpaceX challenged the Air Force launch monopoly in 2014, helping open national security launch to competition. They did not rewrite procurement law, they made the government follow it.
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Anduril benefited from that opening, but also changed the commercial shape of the category. Instead of waiting years for the government to fund custom development, it showed up with working products, sold initial contracts in months, and used a common software base to expand from border towers into counter drone and other programs.
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The real downstream effect was cultural. In 2017, defense tech was not a recognized venture category and many investors saw it as uninvestable. After Palantir, SpaceX, and then Anduril showed visible traction, founders, engineers, and capital started treating defense as a place to build large product companies rather than small services contractors.
The next wave is less likely to copy Anduril directly and more likely to rhyme with it in narrower markets like autonomy, drones, maritime systems, and defense software. The durable lesson is that startups that arrive with a working product, patient capital, and a precise entry point into one military need can become the next accepted vendor class inside defense.