Drone Manufacturer Anduril's Richard Drake: “I Got Tired Giving Soldiers Yesterday's Tech Tomorrow”

Richard Drake (Photography: Dinendra Haria)

Sophie Church

@sophiealichurch

Imagine looking with a bird’s-eye view over a mountainous plane. Red dots and blue dots swarm around each other: blue, our side; red, the enemy. A battle begins: missiles fire in great arcs, with red and blue explosions everywhere.

Miles back, towards the edge of the picture, humans in helicopters loiter. A green pyramid of light – representing an electromagnetic spectrum of communication – connects the red and blue fighters with the helicopters, reaching up to spinning satellites in the sky.

This faux battle is playing out through a virtual reality (VR) headset in the London offices of Anduril, a US autonomous weapons manufacturer that has recently set up in the UK. The opposing forces of red and blue are not humans in tanks, but drones, flying through the air at each other.

Welcome to the new age of warfare. 

Where humans once leapt from trenches and tanks rolled forwards, AI and drones are now performing the same task – punching a hole through enemy defences as the first line of attack, negating loss of equipment and human life in the process.

They could achieve a similar capability much quicker with autonomous systems

Anduril was co-founded in 2017 by enigmatic American entrepreneur Palmer Luckey. The goateed 32-year-old – who owns an airship and drives a recommissioned Disneyland ride car to work – designed the Oculus Rift, a VR headset, at the age of 16. In 2014, Facebook acquired Luckey’s company Oculus VR for $2bn.

In 2017, Luckey founded Anduril. Named after Aragorn’s sword in Lord of the Rings, Anduril is predominately a software company – with around 70 per cent of its all-US venture capital funding flowing towards Lattice, the AI-enabled product the company’s hardware plugs into.

Lattice is currently used in the US to monitor the country’s borders and national infrastructure. It is also used to detect wildfires and search for missing people.

Anduril’s UK and Europe subsidiary was founded in 2019, with Richard Drake appointed general manager in 2023. Seabed Sentry, Anduril’s first product designed in the UK, is now being used to detect threats to our undersea cables. In 2023, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) awarded Anduril £17m to help better protect its armed forces.

The House joins Drake in Anduril’s temporary office in Westminster just days after the government’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR) – Labour’s first evaluation of our defensive capabilities since 2003 – was published.

The company is moving to a new space in Farringdon in three weeks’ time, and the space is in flux, with half of the employees already working from the new site, and boxes lying around the kitchen.

We are ushered into a conference-cum-showroom known as ‘the petting zoo’, where Anduril products surround the table: Ghost, a reconnaissance drone; Altius, a drone which can carry up to 33 pound warheads; and a scale-model of Dive LD, Anduril’s autonomous undersea sub.

With drones now killing more people than traditional artillery in the Ukraine war, the government’s SDR trumpeted the tech Anduril manufactures as “an essential component of land warfare”.

But what did Anduril make of the review?

“We support the move to the investment in drones, and also support that there’s been some bits of restructuring around creating an innovation unit,” Drake, 52, says.

Drake also supports the MoD’s “20-40-40” strategy: where expendable drones and munitions are first launched against the enemy (40 per cent of the attack), followed by heavy equipment such as tanks (20 per cent), supported by drones used for surveillance and intelligence (the final 40 per cent).

Anduril’s US parent company was “very much happy with the direction [the SDR is] taking” when Drake briefed Luckey’s team.

Still, with head of the army General Sir Roland Walker saying the UK must be ready for war in three years, Drake struggles to understand why the government is tendering for equipment that will be delivered well past that date.

“I think ordering, or saying you can order, 12 submarines that aren’t even going to turn up for 30 years when threats seem to be very close is a bit puzzling,” he says. 

“For me, I think they could achieve a similar capability much quicker with autonomous systems.”

When bidding opens for MoD contracts, Drake says Anduril hopes to win “a lot of it”. Is the company capable of bidding for every contract within its purview? “Yes, pretty much,” he says. “And we’d like to.”

Pension funds who didn’t want to invest in defence are beginning to

Anduril received $1.5bn in ‘Series F’ venture capital funding last year – a later stage round of backing sought by companies with proven success looking to expand further. There is now another round of capital raising in the works. “We’ve always been over-subscribed in our funding rounds at Anduril,” Drake says.

The company is also looking to open a factory in the UK. Drake confirms Anduril is considering placing this factory in the Oxford-Cambridge arc – an area of investment on which Chancellor Rachel Reeves has pinned her hopes for growth.

“There are a lot of Formula One supply chain companies around Oxford, Cambridge. So that’s really good for us,” Drake says. “We get really good software engineers, and there’s some really good local councils that want to work with companies like ours. We’re talking to a bunch of those people.”

While Anduril is also speaking to the Welsh government about setting up shop in Wales, Drake says Oxford-Cambridge is the most enticing proposal “on balance”.

Anduril’s rapid expansion may be down to the company’s unique operating style. Where traditional ‘primes’ – large defence companies – make products to order, “down to the atomic level”, Anduril is offering a different solution.

“The way Anduril works is it finds a customer with a problem, and will use its own money to develop something to like 80 per cent finished,” he says. “Then we’ll speak to the customer and go, ‘Okay, well, we’ve got this thing we think answers your problem. Tell us what specifics you need it do.’”

In this way, Anduril takes on all the risk in the relationship. “We live and die by how good we are, and if the government doesn’t like it, they can throw us away and go with someone else.”

Noting its American-ness, Drake drags a slick marketing magazine – Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy – across the table, and opens to a graph. From 1945 to 1975, it took five years for military aircraft to be fully operational. From 1975 to the present day, the line rises sharply. The F-35 aircraft, for example, now takes around 23 years to be fielded.

Drake is a veteran of UK defence firm Babcock, and worked in various roles in the company for more than 16 years. “I personally got tired of giving soldiers, sailors and airmen yesterday’s technology tomorrow. Whereas now, I’m giving them cool stuff straight away,” he says.

Commenting more broadly on large British defence outfits, he says: “It’s very easy to be distracted when you’re in a large company, whereas Anduril is all about putting the right thing in the hands of the war-fighter as quickly as possible.”

But how does this Silicon Valley ‘move fast and break things’ mindset work alongside the structures of  the British government, to which radical thinkers have failed to adjust?

“Sometimes it can be quite painful, because of the way the old system was set up,” Drake says. “I’ve seen that the civil service and government and Defence Equipment and Support [which negotiates defence contracts for the armed forces] and those sorts of people, they realise they need to change, and they’re talking about how that change would happen and how we would do it.”

“For UK PLC to get better and better and better in drones and autonomous systems, they have to always look at their regulatory rules as well,” he says. “Companies like ours and other UK companies can design and build these really cool things, but if we can’t test them well enough in the UK, that’s going to be a problem.”

Has Anduril found this a sticking point with the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA)?

“They are very aware that they need to do new things,” he says. “The CAA and the Military Aviation Authority are people that we are desperate to work with, and they’re happy to work with us as well to try and bring it forward.”

Currently, the MoD must comply with international humanitarian law when using autonomous drone technology. This means humans must always be ‘in-the-loop’ when hardware such as Anduril’s is being used for targeting and firing. However, veterans minister Al Carns suggested the UK may operate drones without human oversight in the future.

For now, Drake says Anduril recognises it must “follow the law of war”. “Ours is about physical life and death and making sure that we remain legal and people remain safe. So we take a very responsible approach to it.”

However, as a defence tech company with financial backing from controversial US right-winger Peter Thiel, it seems plausible Anduril would face a backlash in the UK.

Just last year, for instance, British banks closed more than 300 accounts belonging to defence companies, with senior executives telling MPs they harboured ethical concerns around working with the arms industry.

Among all defence companies, Anduril may be particularly unpalatable. In 2018, Anduril launched Sentry, a surveillance tower which autonomously identifies, detects and tracks objects within a 360 degree range. Sentry towers have been stationed along the US border with Mexico to detect immigrants trying to enter the country illegally.

In the UK, Anduril’s first contract with the government – awarded in 2023 and worth £17m – was for a Sentry tower in the Channel. With the number of small boat crossings currently up 42 per cent from the same time last year, Drake says the Home Office “has got what they need from Anduril” and they have “not received any further approach”.

Does Drake feel comfortable Anduril’s technology is being used to such ends?

“These people are putting their lives at risk, and what we’re doing is helping save them,” he says. “I genuinely believe that we’re finding them quickly so the Border Force can go find them in their boats. We haven’t really seen a change in opinion or rhetoric around it.”

Attitudes towards defence are shifting, Drake thinks. “I think it’s changing within the last six months; I didn’t really feel it before,” he says. “Pension funds who didn’t want to invest in defence are beginning to invest in defence as well.”

Now, Anduril is seeing a stream of software engineers leaving social media companies to work in defence.

Anduril recently released a recruitment video online – ‘Don’t work at Anduril’ – to press this advantage. “It’s not the typical tech job I was expecting,” says a mustachioed actor in the video, posing as an Anduril employee. He sarcastically outlines the downsides of working at Anduril: the founder, Luckey, is always around. Anduril employees come to the office every day. Everyone is bound by the same mission.

“The point of the video was, ‘Yeah, you actually have to work. Are you bored of winging it? You can come here and do some proper stuff,’” says Drake.

“Up until last year, the best software engineers were working out what cat meme your TikTok should show you next, or your Instagram feed should show you. That’s where all the really good software engineers went, or into finance.

“But we’re presenting them with interesting, innovative problems, and finding the people that think defence is important. The nearer we get to what feels like a war footing – government hasn’t said that, but the SDR is suggesting we’re moving towards that state – the more people are realising that this is a mission they would want to be part of.”

In the UK, 20 per cent of Anduril’s staff are veterans. In the US, it’s 40 per cent.

“Everybody in Anduril is mission-focused,” Drake says. “The veterans are there to provide us with context and provide us with that impetus that if we don’t fix this thing, there’s someone – one of their mates – stuck somewhere that hasn’t got what they need.”

Drake is clearly evangelical about Anduril’s contribution to the changing nature of warfare. Joining in with the VR headset display, he excitedly points to features on his favourite products, as if seeing them for the first time.

One such product, autonomous air vehicle Roadrunner, can launch, detect a threat in the air and eliminate it. If the object is non-threatening, Roadrunner will return to base.

Destroying an Iranian-designed Shahed drone in the Gulf would use a million pound missile, says Drake. Roadrunner, however, would be a fifth of that cost.

Spearheading the innovation of such weaponry has put defence figures in the line of fire. Last year, the US foiled a Russian plot to assassinate the chief executive officer of German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall, Armin Papperger. 

Does Drake fear for his safety? “On a personal level, anybody who works in defence is very aware of it, but has chosen to do that,” he says. “But it doesn’t worry me day by day.”

Does it take an element of Luckey-type eccentricity to work in a defence tech firm?

“People think engineers are quirky, but they’re not. We’re normal people,” he says, laughing. “You just have to be bloody good at what you do.”

Though he doesn’t own his own airship like Luckey, Drake makes his own arcade machines from scratch – “which is about as interesting as I get!”

“Other people love working in primes, and love the structure that brings – Anduril suits me,” he adds. “That’s why I came, because I find it really exciting – when your founder’s already made billions and moved on to something else.”

With the SDR published, the government will be “spending some time over the summer” on an investment plan, which would “set out the order” in which it will spend the money, procurement minister Maria Eagle tells The House.

As defence companies jostle for the spoils, it could be Anduril that wins big. 

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