The CEO of the most valuable private defense company in the US just told everyone to calm down. Brian Schimpf, who runs Anduril Industries, warned that the defense tech sector is showing signs of a valuation bubble, with some firms raising capital at 50 to 100 times their forward revenue.
That kind of candor is unusual from someone who just closed a $5 billion funding round. But Schimpf’s warning, delivered in a Fortune interview on June 8, carries weight precisely because Anduril is the sector’s biggest beneficiary of the current capital flood.
The numbers behind the warning
Anduril completed its Series H in May 2026, a round led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz that doubled the company’s valuation to $61 billion from roughly $30.5 billion. The company has now raised over $12 billion cumulatively since Palmer Luckey, the Oculus co-founder, started it in 2017.
Revenue hit nearly $1 billion in 2024, driven by major US government contracts for AI-enabled autonomous systems. So when Schimpf describes what he sees as “a bit of a bubble” in the broader defense tech landscape, he’s speaking from a position of relative strength.
