Palmer Luckey’s tech-focused defense company Anduril Industries is expanding both its local and national base, after inking a deal for a newly built industrial building in Santa Ana and opening a new office in Seattle.
The 3-year-old firm, which uses a combination of radar sensor-clad surveillance towers, drones and artificial intelligence to monitor large areas, recently signed a lease for one of the new buildings at the Shea Business Center, a nearly 500,000-square-foot industrial development nearing completion along Dyer Road.
Anduril’s lease, running some 72,000 square feet, is for one of the nine buildings at the new business park, a development of Aliso Viejo’s Shea Properties.
It’s the first reported lease at Shea’s project, the largest new industrial development to open near John Wayne Airport in years.
The industrial building, just off the Costa Mesa (55) Freeway, is about 4 miles from Anduril’s headquarters in Irvine’s airport area, which it moved into last year. It occupies some 107,000 square feet of creative office and industrial space at that location, at the intersection of Jamboree Road and Michelson Drive.
Hiring Push Continues
Anduril has yet to confirm the new lease, but has begun listing job openings for what it refers to as a “new Santa Ana location,” alongside jobs at its Irvine headquarters and a San Clemente outpost, which the defense-oriented firm uses to serve Camp Pendleton and test out its surveillance and defense-oriented products.
The secretive company was advertising for about 38 job openings as of May 27 in OC, with positions ranging from software engineer to technical operations engineer and security engineer, as well as a tracking and mapping position known as a SLAM engineer.
Anduril employed 160 people in the area as of the end of 2019.
So far, the company isn’t commenting on what may be in store at the Santa Ana warehouse space; product storage appears the most likely use.
Earlier this year, Luckey’s tweets and online job postings suggested the company was heading into super-fast aircraft, vertical takeoff and landing vehicles and spacecraft.
The company is represented in its leases by Tucker Hughes of tenant representation firm Hughes Marino; officials there declined to comment on Anduril’s recent real estate moves.
Boeing’s Backyard
Santa Ana isn’t the only area that Anduril has expanded to recently.
Luckey said last month that Anduril opened the Seattle office to tap “the incredible pool of talent” there.
“We’re building bigger and better systems for our military,” Luckey said.
A Seattle site “helps us accelerate that.”
Job postings on Anduril’s website for the new Seattle office included software and software security engineers, including some roles requiring a security clearance.
Seattle is the former headquarters of aerospace giant Boeing Co. (NYSE: BA), now in Chicago. The aircraft maker employed almost 72,000 people in Washington state as of Jan. 1. Microsoft Inc. (Nasdaq: MSFT) is in Redmond, a suburb of Seattle.
Unicorn’s Growth
Anduril develops hardware and software centered around what it calls Lattice, an artificial intelligence system allowing for real-time information analysis.
Customers include defense and homeland security departments in the U.S., as well as the defense ministry in the U.K.
Luckey, also the founder of Oculus VR, said Anduril “continues to scale” and now has offices in Irvine, Seattle and Washington, D.C.
Investors in the firm, founded in 2017, include Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Lux Capital, 8VC and Andreessen Horowitz.
Anduril last September secured $127 million in a seed funding round, putting the startup company’s valuation in the $1 billion range.
It’s the fastest an area technology company has achieved unicorn status in some six years, when Luckey’s virtual reality headset-maker Oculus VR, vaulted past $1 billion in a matter of years and was snapped up by Facebook for about $3 billion.
