Nuro

Anduril

Nuro

Nuro's business model is delivery-as-a-service. They partner with retailers, restaurants, and grocery chains who pay Nuro to handle last-mile delivery using autonomous vehicles.

Instead of employing human drivers, partners use Nuro's robot fleet.

The economics are compelling on paper. A human delivery driver costs $15-25 per hour including wages, insurance, and vehicle costs.

A Nuro vehicle costs money to build and maintain, but once deployed, it operates nearly 24/7 with no driver wages, no tips, and no breaks. The breakeven point comes when the fleet reaches sufficient utilization in a market.

Revenue also comes from technology licensing. Nuro has partnerships where their autonomy stack could be integrated into other vehicles or platforms.

FedEx, Domino's, Kroger, Walmart, and 7-Eleven have all tested or deployed Nuro vehicles for delivery.

Anduril

Anduril flips the traditional defense business model. Instead of cost-plus contracts where the government pays for development, Anduril invests its own capital in R&D and sells finished products.

This means they own the intellectual property and can sell the same platform to multiple customers — the US military, allied nations, and potentially commercial clients.

Revenue comes from hardware sales (drones, autonomous vehicles, sensor towers), software licensing (the Lattice operating system), and service contracts for deployment and maintenance. The company has won contracts with the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, US Special Operations Command, and allied militaries including the UK and Australia.

The venture-funded approach lets them move at startup speed. While Lockheed might take 7 years to develop a new system, Anduril can prototype in months and iterate based on field feedback.

The trade-off is massive upfront investment — they've raised $3.7 billion in venture capital to fund this approach.

Nuro

Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu were both principal engineers at Google's self-driving car project (later Waymo). Ferguson led the machine learning and motion planning teams.

Zhu worked on perception — teaching cars to see and understand the world. They were two of the most senior engineers in autonomous driving.

In 2016, they left Google with a contrarian insight: the hardest part of self-driving cars wasn't the technology. It was the stakes.

A robo-taxi carrying passengers needs to be essentially perfect — any accident could injure or kill someone inside and destroy public trust. But a delivery vehicle carrying groceries?

If it gets in a fender bender, the worst case is squished bananas.

By removing the human from the vehicle, Nuro eliminated the most complex variable in autonomous driving safety. Their vehicles are small, light (under 1,200 pounds), and slow (max 25 mph on surface streets).

If one hits a pedestrian, the impact energy is dramatically lower than a 4,000-pound car going 40 mph. This let them get regulatory approval years before full-size robo-taxis.

The first prototype, R1, looked like a cartoon car — about half the width of a normal vehicle, with no windows, no mirrors, and no driver's seat. Just cargo space and sensors.

They revealed it in 2018 and began testing in Scottsdale, Arizona with Kroger for grocery deliveries.

Anduril

Palmer Luckey was already famous — and controversial — before Anduril. He founded Oculus VR at 18, sold it to Facebook for $2 billion at 21, and then was fired in 2017 after a political donation scandal.

He was 24 years old, already worth hundreds of millions, and suddenly had nothing to do.

Luckey teamed up with Trae Stephens, a Founders Fund partner who had previously worked at Palantir and as a member of the Trump transition team's Department of Defense group. They saw the same problem from different angles: the US military was spending billions on outdated technology from legacy contractors (Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing) while China was rapidly modernizing.

The Pentagon's procurement process was broken — it took 10-15 years and billions of dollars to develop and deploy new weapons systems.

Anduril was founded in mid-2017 with a radical approach: build the technology first with venture capital, then sell finished products to the government. Traditional defense contractors get cost-plus contracts — they bill the government for development costs plus a margin, which incentivizes slow development and cost overruns.

Anduril said: we'll fund our own R&D, build the product, and sell it off the shelf. If it doesn't work, we eat the cost.

The name comes from the reforged sword of Aragorn in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings — a weapon that was broken and made new.

Nuro

Nuro's strategy is to become the default autonomous delivery infrastructure for major retailers. Rather than build a consumer-facing delivery app (competing with DoorDash and Instacart), Nuro provides the robotic fleet that powers deliveries for existing brands.

The partnership-first approach reduces go-to-market friction. Kroger, Walmart, and FedEx already have massive customer bases and order volumes.

Nuro provides the autonomous last-mile delivery layer. The retailer gets lower delivery costs.

Nuro gets guaranteed demand.

Geographic expansion follows a city-by-city playbook. Nuro maps a market, gets regulatory approval, deploys a small fleet, proves reliability, then scales up.

Houston and Mountain View were early markets. The goal is to have fleets operating in major metros across the US.

Anduril

Anduril's growth strategy is classic disruption — enter at the low end of the market with cheaper, faster products and expand upward. They started with border security (relatively low-stakes) and moved into counter-drone systems (active combat relevant), then into autonomous vehicles and munitions (core defense).

International sales are a major growth vector. Anduril has contracts with the UK Ministry of Defence, the Australian Defence Force, and other Five Eyes allies.

The AUKUS defense pact between the US, UK, and Australia specifically calls for technology sharing in areas where Anduril specializes.

The Ukraine war was an inflection point. It demonstrated that small, cheap, autonomous drones could be decisive in modern warfare — exactly the kind of systems Anduril builds.

Suddenly, every military in the world wanted what Anduril was selling, and wanted it fast. The company's order backlog reportedly exceeds $10 billion.

Nuro

The technology still has limitations in complex scenarios. Nuro vehicles operate on surface streets at low speeds — they can't handle highways, heavy snow, or extremely dense urban environments like Manhattan.

This limits the addressable market to suburban deliveries in good weather, which is a large market but not the whole market.

The path to profitability is long. Building custom autonomous vehicles is extraordinarily capital-intensive.

Each generation of vehicle requires hundreds of millions in design, engineering, testing, and manufacturing. Nuro has burned through most of its $2.1 billion in funding and laid off 30% of staff in 2023, signaling the cash crunch is real.

Competition comes from multiple directions. Amazon is developing its own delivery robots (Scout, though paused).

Waymo and Cruise could pivot to autonomous delivery. Established delivery companies could partner with other autonomy providers.

And human drivers remain cheaper than robots at current scale — the economics only flip once Nuro has hundreds or thousands of vehicles per market.

Anduril

The ethical debate around autonomous weapons is constant and unavoidable. Anduril builds systems that can identify and engage targets with varying degrees of human oversight.

Critics argue this is a step toward fully autonomous killing machines. Anduril maintains that a human is always "in the loop" for lethal decisions, but the line between "in the loop" and "on the loop" (supervising but not directly controlling) is blurry.

Recruiting is both an advantage and a challenge. Anduril pays Silicon Valley salaries and offers startup equity, which attracts top engineers who might never consider working for Raytheon.

But some engineers refuse to work on weapons systems on principle. Google famously dropped Project Maven (a Pentagon AI contract) after employee protests.

Anduril leans into the controversy — they explicitly look for people who are comfortable building defense technology.

Scaling manufacturing is the next hurdle. Software companies scale effortlessly.

Hardware companies that build drones, missiles, and autonomous vehicles need factories, supply chains, and quality control at defense-grade standards. Anduril is building a massive manufacturing facility to produce thousands of autonomous systems, but transitioning from prototype to mass production is where many defense startups fail.

Nuro

Nuro R3 — the third-generation autonomous delivery vehicle, purpose-built with no passenger compartment. Larger cargo capacity than R2, improved sensor suite, and designed for commercial-scale manufacturing.

Nuro Autonomy Platform — the self-driving software stack including perception, prediction, planning, and control that runs Nuro's vehicles. Nuro Driver — the AI system that handles all driving decisions in real-time, combining lidar, cameras, radar, and thermal sensors.

Nuro Fleet Management — cloud-based tools for partners to monitor, dispatch, and manage Nuro vehicles across delivery zones.

Anduril

Lattice — an AI-powered operating system that fuses sensor data from multiple sources into a single real-time picture of the battlefield. Think of it as the central nervous system that connects all of Anduril's hardware.

Ghost — a family of small autonomous aircraft (drones) designed for surveillance, electronic warfare, and strike missions. Ranging from handheld to medium-altitude.

Anvil — an autonomous counter-drone system that physically intercepts enemy drones by ramming into them mid-air. Yes, a kamikaze drone that kills other drones.

Sentry Tower — autonomous surveillance towers originally deployed on the US-Mexico border for border security, using AI to detect and classify objects and people. Altius — a family of tube-launched autonomous munitions that can loiter over an area and strike targets with precision.

Nuro

SoftBank Vision Fund led the massive $940 million Series B in 2019. Tiger Global led the Series C at an $8.6 billion valuation.

Greylock Partners and Gaorong Capital were early investors. Alphabet (Google's parent) invested through its venture arm.

Woven Capital (Toyota's investment fund) participated, reflecting automotive industry interest. The company has raised approximately $2.1 billion total.

Anduril

Andreessen Horowitz has been the most prominent backer, leading multiple rounds. Founders Fund (Peter Thiel's firm) invested early — Trae Stephens was a Founders Fund partner before co-founding Anduril.

General Catalyst, Valor Equity Partners, and 8VC (Joe Lonsdale, another Palantir co-founder) also invested. The Series F in 2024 valued the company at $14 billion.

Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, and Sands Capital participated in later rounds.