In Brief
Palmer Luckey’s defense-tech company is in the middle of a multibillion-dollar funding round led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal.
The funding round would come less than a year after the company’s Series G, which closed in June with $2.5 billion against a $30 billion valuation. Lux Capital and Founders Fund are also expected to participate.
A previous report from Bloomberg said the new round could bring as much as $8 billion of capital into the company, which closed its previous funding round last summer.
The round comes at an awkward moment for defense startups. After a contract dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon, the U.S. government is in the process of canceling all its contracts with the AI company, and Secretary of Defense Hegseth has threatened to designate the company as a supply-chain risk.
While not explicitly endorsing the supply-chain-risk designation, Luckey has vocally supported the government’s stance. “At the end of the day,” Luckey wrote in a recent X post, “you have to believe that our imperfect constitutional republic is still good enough to run a country without outsourcing the real levers of power to billionaires and corpos and their shadow advisors.”