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Anduril Still in the Spotlight

Anduril Still in the Spotlight

Christopher Webster
February 12, 2025

Startups:

$160M for carbon removal :

Chestnut Carbon is a carbon removal startup based out of New York. The company buys marginal and degraded farmland, plants native trees on them, and the harvests the resulting carbon credits. Carbon credits is a big topic among tech companies. The credits offset skyrocketing emissions caused in part by the massive expansion of data canters serving cloud and AI customers. Chestnut Carbon has recently secured $160 million in a Series B financing round. Will companies that sell their carbon credits so big tech can keep creating more emissions continue to be successful into the future?

Anduril is the company to be right now:

We know that defense tech is having its moment right now, and that Anduril is at the center of that. Which means that yet again we have another story on Anduril. That being that Anduril is taking control of Microsoft’s $22 billion VR military headset program. They are only waiting on final approval from the Department of Defense. Microsoft was originally granted the contract in 2018, but they have been unsuccessful in completing the contract so it has moved on to Anduril. This is a big deal for Anduril founder Palmer Luckey because he is actually the founder of Oculus, one of the first VR headsets, which he sold to Facebook (now Meta) in 2014. His plan with Oculus was to eventually have it be used for military training. It is exciting seeing all of this new tech being implemented into our military. What will we see next?

Venture:

Founders Fund:

How does $3 billion sound? Well that’s what Founders Fund is about to raise for their third growth fund by the end of March. Founders Fund is Peter Thiel’s venture fund. If you ever watched The Social Network about how Facebook was started. Peter Theil was the guy that Mark went to for money to make Facebook what it is today. The new fund is for additional investments in the firms already successful late-stage companies. Founders Fund is use to big raises as their previous growth fund was $3.4 billion back in 2022. The firm also doesn’t have a tough time trying to find investors. People are pretty much begging to be included in the fund with Founders Fund exceptional investing record. Some of the companies that are in the funds portfolio are Anduril, SpaceX, Stripe, OpenAI, and Figma. Every startup wants the chance to have Founders Fund invest in them. What companies will Founders Fund invest in with this new raise?

Big Tech:

Stripe shareholder sale:

Why is Stripe still private? I am sure this is something that investors and employees alike are asking themselves. This could also be one of the reasons why Stripe is in talks for another shareholder sale. The sale is also likely to show that the company’s new valuation is around $85 billion. That’s a pretty big number for a private company. The sale is to help employees liquidate since Stripe is still holding off their plans to go public. Stripe had a similar offer last February when it was valued at $70 billion. Will this be the last shareholder sale before they go public?