Anduril just closed a $5 billion Series H round at a $61 billion valuation. One year ago, it was worth $30.5 billion. Two years ago, it was a defense startup most people outside of VC circles had never heard of.

Now it is the most valuable private defense company on Earth, and it is not particularly close.

Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz led the round, both returning investors. The nine-year-old company has now raised more than $11 billion from investors, according to Tracxn data. CEO Brian Schimpf announced the raise Wednesday, noting that Anduril doubled revenue to $2.2 billion in 2025. That is not startup revenue. That is Palantir territory.

Here is why this matters beyond the headline number: defense tech is no longer a niche VC thesis. It is THE thesis.

Shield AI raised $1.5 billion in March at a $12.7 billion valuation. Hermeus, which makes hypersonic unmanned fighter jets, closed $350 million at over $1 billion in April. Helsing, the European defense AI company backed by Spotify founder Daniel Ek, is reportedly close to raising $1.2 billion at $18 billion. These are not speculative AI wrappers. They build weapons.

Anduril sits at the center of this wave for a reason. In the past few weeks alone, it announced a contract for space-based interceptors as part of the "Golden Dome for America" missile defense shield. It won a Dutch Ministry of Defence contract. It landed a U.S. Army deal for battle manager software using its Lattice platform, which analyzes data from joint missile defense systems.

But here is the interesting wrinkle: the Department of Defense is not going all-in on Anduril. When the Air Force selected Shield AI's software to work with Anduril's "Fury" autonomous fighter jet rather than giving the entire contract to one company, it sent a signal. The Pentagon wants competition, not a single AI defense monopoly.

That is smart, but it does not change the math. When Schimpf founded Anduril in 2017, defense was not a category that attracted significant venture investment. His words, from the announcement post. He is right. The transformation has been total. Defense AI went from fringe to the single highest-conviction sector in venture capital in under five years.

The comparison to the consumer AI boom is instructive. OpenAI is valued at $852 billion. Anthropic is reportedly targeting $950 billion. These are companies burning cash to train language models. Anduril is at $61 billion with $2.2 billion in real, contract-backed revenue from the largest customer on Earth: the U.S. military.

One of these business models makes more sense than the other. The market just told you which one.

What to watch: Anduril is almost certainly heading for an IPO. With $2.2 billion in revenue, $11 billion raised, and a $61 billion valuation, the public market story writes itself. The question is not if but when, and whether the defense tech sector can sustain these multiples once retail investors start pricing in the reality that government contracts take decades, not quarters.

First reported by TechCrunch and confirmed by Reuters, NYT, and CNBC.