Anduril CEO Palmer Luckey says the protection tech corporate will ‘unquestionably’ move public

Defense tech startup Anduril Industries will move public, founder and CEO Palmer Luckey mentioned Tuesday.

“We are definitely going to be a publicly traded company,” he advised CNBC’s “Closing Bell: Overtime.” “We are running this company to be the shape of a publicly traded company.”

He added that there is not “really a path” for a corporation like Anduril to win important trillion-dollar protection contracts with out going public.

Luckey didn’t element an IPO timeline.

Since its founding, Anduril has risen to turn into one of the crucial extremely valued personal U.S. generation corporations and is an innovator within the protection tech house, chipping away at pageant from business leaders Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

The corporate, which ranked No.1 at the CNBC Disruptor 50 listing this 12 months, was once created by way of Luckey in 2017 after he was once driven out by way of Meta. Luckey offered his digital actuality headset corporate Oculus to Facebook in 2014.

Despite Luckey’s ousting, the corporations introduced a joint partnership to create digital and augmented actuality gadgets for the U.S. Army closing month.

“I’m working with Meta because we’ve buried the hatchet and because there’s a lot of incredible technology that they have, that paired with Anduril, can make a huge difference for the American war fighter,” he mentioned.

Anduril has persisted to scoop up investment in spite of a troublesome deal atmosphere that is simply starting to reopen for IPOs after a multi-year drought.

Chairman Trae Stephens advised Bloomberg closing week that Anduril lately raised $2.5 billion at a $30.5 billion valuation. That greater than doubles its valuation from a investment spherical in August led by way of Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.

Anduril lately took over Microsoft‘s $22 billion augmented-reality headset program with the U.S. Army. The corporate additionally unveiled a partnership with OpenAI in December, and introduced plans to take a position more or less $1 billion in a producing facility in Ohio previous this 12 months.

WATCH: Anduril tops CNBC’s Disruptor 50 listing, watch complete interview with Founder Palmer Luckey