Rich Smith, The Motley Fool
6 min read
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Unicorn defense and AI stock Anduril hit its first $1 billion valuation six years ago.
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Today, Anduril is making $1 billion a year in revenue, its privately-owned stock has gone up 30-fold, and it wants to IPO.
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Anduril's a popular defense stock, but it costs far too much to justify buying.
Once upon a time, unicorn companies -- privately owned, but valued in excess of $1 billion -- were a rare breed. Lately, there seem to be whole herds of them.
Take Anduril for example. The privately held artificial intelligence and defense company founded by Oculus VR inventor Palmer Luckey first hit the magic $1 billion private market value back in 2019. But Anduril didn't stop there. Growing steadily over the past half-decade, the privately traded defense stock last week raised $2.5 billion in new cash, and the company as a whole is now valued at $30.5 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg.
That's a growth rate any investor would love to get a piece of. And while you cannot invest in Anduril stock yet, you might soon be able to.
Because Anduril says it's going to IPO.
Anduril Chairman Trae Stephens told Bloomberg his company aims to "scale into the largest problems for the national security community." Of particular note, Anduril recently took over a gigantic $22 billion Pentagon augmented reality contract from Microsoft. But Anduril needs cash to reach the scale it wants "to shore up the balance sheet and make sure we have the ability to deploy capital into these manufacturing and production problem sets that we're working on."
Pre-IPO companies like Anduril have three ways they can do that. They can take out loans (at currently high interest rates). Or they can hold an IPO and sell their shares to public investors for cash. Or they can sell shares discretely, in a private stock offering. This last route is the one Anduril took, but in his interview with Bloomberg, Stephens made it clear he's not ruling out an IPO -- at all.
"Long term we continue to believe that Anduril is the shape of a publicly traded company," said Stephens. "We're not in any rapid path to doing that [but] we're certainly going through the processes required to prepare for doing something like that in the medium term."
Stephens and Luckey might want to shift that focus into the short term, however, because circumstances may never be better to make Anduril a popular IPO stock. It's been only a couple of weeks now since Ukraine launched Operation Spiderweb, deploying more than 100 artificial intelligence (AI)-guided drones from trucks to attack airfields across Russia, causing billions of dollars' worth of damage to military assets -- apparently with no casualties -- for an investment measured in thousands of dollars.
