Palmer Luckey’s new defense technology startup, Anduril Industries Inc., is preparing to take up a much more prominent position in Orange County, and appears poised for a major hiring push.
The secretive Irvine-based firm, which the Oculus VR co-founder started in June 2017, recently committed to lease one of the largest creative-office buildings in the John Wayne Airport-area market.
The company will set up shop at 2722 Michelson Drive, a 155,000-square-foot building a few blocks from the airport, according to area brokerages.
The building is under construction, and scheduled to be available for occupancy this year. It’s owned by Irvine-based LBA Realty.
Anduril Industries will lease the entire property, according to a second-quarter office report by brokerage Savills Studley.
It’s the largest office lease reported in Orange County so far this year.
The building should comfortably hold several hundred employees. The company’s LinkedIn site said it has fewer than 50 employees. Its website currently shows 10 job openings, all engineering-related.
“As Anduril grows their team of engineers working on defense issues, our Orange County community will greatly benefit from the innovation and highly skilled jobs they bring to the area,” said Tucker Hughes, managing director for the Irvine office of brokerage Hughes Marino, which represented Anduril in the new lease.
Out at Oculus
Anduril Industries is the second notable company the 25-year-old Luckey has headquartered in Irvine.
Virtual reality headset maker Oculus was snapped up in 2014 by Facebook Inc. for $2 billion, capping a meteoric rise for the entrepreneur, who’d already been a Time magazine cover star.
Oculus moved its headquarters to Silicon Valley following the acquisition.
Luckey, a Long Beach native who now has a home in Newport Beach and owns a marina in Huntington Beach, left Facebook last year.
Shortly thereafter he started Anduril Industries, whose lead investor is Founders Fund, a venture capital firm headed by billionaire Peter Thiel, who, like Luckey, has been a prominent supporter of Donald Trump.
A few engineers coming from Thiel’s Palo Alto-based software firm Palantir Technologies are among the top executives at the new company, whose operations and plans have only recently begun to attract some national attention.
Founders Fund led a $41 million round for the company this past May, according to a recent profile on Anduril Industries in Wired magazine, which gave one of the first glimpses into the ambitious plans for the firm, whose business plan carries some political undertones.
The company aims to combine virtual reality with surveillance tools, and “is pitching its technology to the Department of Homeland Security as a complement to—or substitute for—much of President Trump’s promised physical wall along the border with Mexico,” the Wired report said.
The goal is to “become a major tech startup that builds hardware and software specifically for the defense industry,” the June 11 report said.
“Our mission is to build the best tech to defend America and her allies,” Luckey said in a tweet last month upon Anduril’s one-year anniversary. “More to come soon!”
St. John Site
The building where Anduril plans to relocate previously served as a manufacturing and office property for apparel company St. John Knits International Inc., which vacated the site at the corner of Jamboree Road and Michelson Drive about six years ago.
LBA Realty bought the property about four years ago, and considered a massive mixed-use development on the 9.4-acre site before changing plans last year to renovate the existing property for creative-office uses.
The plan is to turn it into a “next generation” creative-office project featuring “significant natural light as well as new indoor/outdoor collaborative spaces,” according to marketing materials prepared for the property by Cushman & Wakefield, whose Bob Thagard and John Griffin handled the project’s listing.
