GeekWire | Anduril Industries expands to Seattle, seeks engineers to work on AI-centric defense tech

One of Anduril's sentry towers stands tall at the company's HQ in California's Orange County. (Anduril Photo)

Irvine, Calif.-based Anduril Industries says it's opening a new office in Seattle and will be hiring engineers to work on defense technologies.

• Founded in 2017, Anduril develops hardware and software centered around Lattice, an AI backbone allowing for real-time information analysis across the company's range of products. Those products include a surveillance drone called the Ghost, an interceptor drone called the Anvil, medical transport drones and a border monitoring system that relies on sensor-equipped sentry towers.
• Anduril's customers include the U.S. Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security and the British Ministry of Defense. "We are building bigger and better systems for our military as quickly as we can," Palmer Luckey, the venture's founder, said in a news release. "The incredible pool of talent in the Seattle area helps us accelerate that."
• Last September, Anduril reportedly raised $127 million in a funding round that was said to push its valuation into unicorn territory, past the $1 billion mark. There's been some controversy along the way: Luckey founded Anduril after being fired from Facebook — by some accounts, due to his politics; by other accounts, due to the outcome of an intellectual property dispute.

via https://ift.tt/2WMjPOJ