Inside the $84 Billion Frenzy for Anduril Stock Ahead of Its Long-Rumored IPO

In a warehouse that resembles a Silicon Valley startup rather than a defense contractor, engineers are putting together the underwater drones that the U.S. Navy has begun referring to as “Ghost Sharks.” Everyone on Wall Street suddenly wants a piece of Anduril Industries, the company that is building them. And that’s the issue for the majority of people. As of late April, Anduril stock was trading on the private secondary market at about $96.01 per share, suggesting a valuation of about $84.5 billion. However, you are unable to purchase it in the same manner as you would purchase Nvidia prior to lunch.

Anduril was founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, the same Palmer Luckey who sold Oculus to Facebook, gave keynote addresses while sporting Hawaiian shirts, and was subsequently ejected from Meta. Over the course of its existence, Anduril has quietly woven itself into the fabric of contemporary warfare. Along the border between the United States and Mexico are sentry towers. Air Force autonomous aircraft. The company claims that Lattice, an AI platform, connects everything. With nine funding rounds under its belt and 5,001 full-time employees, the company has obviously outgrown the skepticism that greeted it when Luckey first presented defense technology to hesitant Bay Area investors.

However, the current situation is different. The hype surrounding Anduril shares seems to have moved beyond sensible pricing and into a more cultural realm. In March, Business Insider compared it to a rush for Taylor Swift tickets, with customers willing to pay up to 40% more to secure a seat. Depending on the listing, the size of the block, and the seller’s level of desperation, the share price has been fluctuating between $67 and $158 on sites like Hiive, Forge, and EquityZen. You can learn more about cryptocurrency than Anduril from tokenized versions that are circulating on cryptocurrency exchanges, which have been quoted closer to $158.

To the extent that they are visible to outsiders, the fundamentals contribute to the explanation of the appetite. According to reports, the company has been aiming for $1 billion in revenue annually, raised $2.5 billion in a Series G round last year, and added an additional $500 million in January. The same Meta that once kicked Luckey out is now collaborating with Anduril on AR and VR gear for soldiers, which is the kind of cultural loop that makes headlines on its own. Since Silicon Valley still liked to act as though it didn’t want Pentagon funding in the early 2020s, it’s difficult to ignore how drastically the atmosphere surrounding defense technology has changed.

The retail investor, however, is confined to the window with his nose up against the glass. Since Anduril is still private, only accredited investors—those who can demonstrate a million-dollar net worth or a few hundred thousand dollars in annual income—are able to purchase shares. It leaves everyone else looking for proxies. In the hopes that the spillover will be sufficient, enthusiasts trade tickers on Reddit such as Kraken Robotics, which provides batteries and sonar for the Ghost Sharks, or Archer Aviation. It is occasionally the case. It usually isn’t. When Tesla was still a private curiosity years ago, it encountered similar skepticism; those who waited for the public listing fared well. Most of those who pursued proxies did not.

Anduril may or may not file, but it’s still unclear. The company appears to relish the flexibility of not having to respond to quarterly earnings calls, and Luckey has stated in interviews that he is not in a rush. The most frequently discussed window is late 2026 or 2027, when a Nasdaq listing is anticipated under a ticker that investors have already partially reserved in their minds: ANDL, perhaps, or ANDR. As this develops, there’s a sense that the most intriguing money will have already been made by the time the IPO happens. Usually, this is the case. Even so, Anduril’s own future continues to be one of the more difficult things in technology to price for a company that develops tools designed to tell a soldier in real time what’s over the next hill.