Anduril Raises $5B at $61B as AI Funding Surges

Defense tech company Anduril closed a $5 billion Series H round at a $61 billion valuation on Wednesday, May 13, 2026 — more than doubling the $30.5 billion valuation it held less than a year ago. The same week, AI voice startup Vapi closed a $50 million Series B at $500 million, and workforce upskilling platform Multiverse secured $70 million at $2.1 billion, underscoring the breadth of the current AI funding cycle.

Anduril’s $5B Series H: Defense Tech Reaches New Heights

According to TechCrunch, the round was led by returning investors Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz — the same firms that backed the company’s prior raise. The previous round, a $2.5 billion raise led by Founders Fund roughly 11 months earlier, had already set a record: Founders Fund wrote a $1 billion check, the largest single check in that firm’s history.

Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf said in a blog post announcing the raise that the company will “aggressively” invest in manufacturing, research, and infrastructure to support U.S. defense systems, according to CNBC. Schimpf also noted that Anduril doubled revenue in 2025 to $2.2 billion, giving the round a clear revenue foundation rather than pure speculation.

Founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, Anduril is now nine years old and has moved well beyond its early drone-hardware roots. Recent contract wins include participation in a space-based missile defense system — a “golden dome” designed to protect the continental U.S. — as well as a contract from the Dutch Ministry of Defense and a U.S. Army deal for battle manager software built on Anduril’s Lattice platform.

The DoD Is Not Going All-In on One Vendor

Despite Anduril’s fundraising dominance, the Department of Defense signaled it intends to distribute contracts across multiple vendors. TechCrunch reported that Shield AI — another U.S. drone startup that raised $1.5 billion in March — had its software selected by the Air Force to run alongside Anduril’s “Fury” autonomous fighter jet, rather than awarding the full hardware-and-software contract to either company alone. The split decision reflects a procurement posture that avoids single-vendor lock-in even as it channels record capital into the sector.

Vapi Wins Amazon Ring, Closes $50M Series B

AI voice infrastructure startup Vapi raised a $50 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners at a post-money valuation of approximately $500 million, according to a person familiar with the matter cited by TechCrunch.

The raise was anchored by a high-profile enterprise win: Amazon Ring selected Vapi after evaluating more than 40 AI voice vendors during last year’s holiday season, when the company faced a surge in inbound customer-support calls. Ring now routes 100% of its inbound calls through Vapi’s platform.

Jason Mitura, vice president of software development at Amazon Ring, told TechCrunch that customer satisfaction scores improved after deployment and that Ring’s teams could tune the AI agent experience without depending on engineering resources. “A lot of AI tools promise great outcomes — Vapi has delivered on them,” he said.

Vapi was founded by Jordan Dearsley and Nikhil Gupta, University of Waterloo classmates who previously went through Y Combinator with a productivity startup called Superpowered. Dearsley built an early AI therapist in 2023 for his daily walks; the therapy product itself found little demand, but the low-latency voice infrastructure underneath it attracted startups. The pair pivoted, launched Vapi publicly in 2024, and the platform has since handled more than 1 billion calls.

Vapi’s product covers voice agent deployment for customer support, lead qualification, appointment scheduling, and outbound sales. The platform’s appeal to Ring centered on granular control: Ring engineers could tune how AI agents behaved in live calls, an operational flexibility that larger, more opaque enterprise voice tools often lack.

Multiverse Raises $70M at $2.1B for AI-Powered Upskilling

Multiverse, the workforce upskilling company founded by Euan Blair, raised $70 million in a new funding round at a $2.1 billion valuation, according to Retail Technology Innovation Hub via Google News. The raise positions Multiverse as a unicorn in the enterprise learning and development space, applying AI to apprenticeship-style training programs.

Multiverse’s model combines structured workplace learning with AI-driven coaching and assessment, targeting large employers looking to develop technical and analytical skills in their workforces without relying solely on traditional degree pipelines. The $2.1 billion valuation reflects investor appetite for AI applications in human capital — a category that has attracted growing attention as companies face both AI-driven workflow changes and persistent skills gaps.

The round’s size and valuation are notable given that enterprise upskilling is a slower-burn market than, say, defense contracts or consumer AI. The fact that Multiverse commands a unicorn-level valuation suggests investors see durable, recurring revenue potential in corporate training contracts rather than a quick-exit play.

Defense Tech VC: A Sector Transformed Since 2017

The Anduril raise is the most visible data point in a broader reorientation of venture capital toward defense and national security technology. Schimpf noted in his blog post that “when we founded Anduril in 2017, defense was not a category that attracted significant venture investment. That has changed meaningfully over the last several years.”

The numbers back that up. Beyond Anduril’s $5 billion close, Shield AI raised $1.5 billion in March 2026, according to TechCrunch. The defense tech funding boom has coincided with increased government spending on autonomous systems, AI-enabled battlefield software, and missile defense infrastructure — all areas where Anduril has active contracts.

For venture firms, the calculus has shifted: defense contracts offer long-duration, government-backed revenue that is relatively insulated from consumer sentiment or advertising cycles. Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz returning to lead Anduril’s Series H — after already being in at the prior valuation — signals conviction that the revenue trajectory justifies the doubled price.

The DoD’s decision to split contracts between Anduril and Shield AI, rather than consolidating with a single vendor, also suggests the government views this as a competitive market rather than a winner-take-all outcome. That could sustain elevated funding across multiple defense AI companies rather than concentrating capital in one.

What This Means

Three raises announced in the same week — Anduril at $61 billion, Vapi at $500 million, Multiverse at $2.1 billion — illustrate how AI investment has spread across verticals that would have seemed unrelated even two years ago. Defense autonomy, voice infrastructure, and corporate training share little in common operationally, but all three attracted institutional capital on the strength of AI-differentiated products with measurable enterprise outcomes.

Vapi’s trajectory is particularly instructive for early-stage AI companies. The $500 million valuation followed not a flashy consumer launch but a single, well-documented enterprise deployment — Amazon Ring routing 100% of its inbound calls through the platform. In a market where AI vendors routinely overpromise, a verifiable reference customer with improved satisfaction scores carries outsized weight with investors.

Anduril’s doubling in under a year, from $30.5 billion to $61 billion, also resets expectations for what defense tech valuations can reach. The company’s $2.2 billion in 2025 revenue gives it a roughly 28x revenue multiple at the new valuation — aggressive, but not untethered from fundamentals given the contract pipeline and the sector’s structural tailwinds.

For founders watching from the outside, the common thread across all three raises is demonstrated traction: revenue growth, named customers, and deployments at scale. The current funding environment rewards specificity over vision.

FAQ

What is Anduril’s current valuation after its Series H?

Anduril closed its Series H at a $61 billion valuation, according to TechCrunch. That is more than double the $30.5 billion valuation from its prior round roughly 11 months earlier, which was itself led by Founders Fund.

What does Vapi do and who are its customers?

Vapi provides infrastructure for companies to build, deploy, and manage AI voice agents across customer support, sales, and scheduling use cases. Its highest-profile customer is Amazon Ring, which routes 100% of its inbound customer calls through Vapi’s platform after evaluating more than 40 competing vendors.

Who leads Anduril’s latest funding round?

Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz co-led the $5 billion Series H, both returning from prior rounds. The round closed Wednesday, May 13, 2026, and follows a March 2026 report that the raise was in process, according to TechCrunch.