Brian Schimpf

Since co-founding Anduril in 2017, Brian Schimpf has pursued a simple but disruptive proposition: military systems should evolve more like software, while the industrial base behind them must move more like technology manufacturing. The company has grown from a handful of engineers in a California desert into a defence technology business valued at $61 billion, with a portfolio spanning autonomous aircraft, missiles, counter-drone systems, submarines and AI-enabled command and control.

Schimpf is less recognisable than Anduril’s co-founder Palmer Luckey. Yet he has been CEO from the beginning and remains the company’s engineering and operational centre of gravity. Fortune’s 2026 profile describes him as the engineer-CEO driving Anduril’s challenge to the established defence primes.

The roots of that approach lie in Schimpf’s decade at Palantir. Joining straight from Cornell, he began as an early software engineer before moving into engineering leadership. There, he learned to put engineers close to customers, deploy early, observe what happened in the field and iterate. That experience would become central to how he built Anduril.

In 2017, Schimpf put that philosophy into practice in an unusually tangible setting. Living out of a trailer in California’s Apple Valley, he built Sentry, an autonomous solar-powered surveillance tower. Its successful demonstration became Anduril’s first sale. More importantly, the software and data architecture underneath it became the foundation for Lattice, the platform now designed to connect sensors, autonomous systems and human decision-makers across the battlefield.

That evolution explains Brian Schimpf’s larger ambition. He does not see defence technology as a collection of increasingly sophisticated machines, but as an integrated system of software, hardware, data, supply chains and manufacturing capacity.

The distinction matters. Modern warfare is consuming weapons and equipment at rates that traditional procurement systems struggle to replace. Schimpf argues that the answer is not simply more exquisite platforms, but “intelligent mass”: capable, networked systems that can be produced in meaningful numbers, improved quickly and deployed before the strategic environment changes again.

That philosophy now faces its hardest test. Anduril is moving into large-scale production while expanding its role with the US military and allied governments. Brian Schimpf is equally candid about the risks, acknowledging that some systems have fallen short in real-world conditions. His response is characteristic: defence technology is exceptionally difficult, so the ability to learn and iterate matters as much as getting the first version right.

The central challenge is therefore bigger than building the next generation of weapons. Can a defence industry built for decades-long procurement become fast enough, adaptable enough and industrially capable enough for the wars now emerging?