The idea for EagleEye is as old as Anduril, says Palmer Luckey.
In an episode of the “TBPN” podcast released on Tuesday, the Anduril cofounder said the company has been working on its recently launched EagleEye range of devices since the defense tech startup was founded in 2017.
“A lot of people think that this move into announcing our augmented reality efforts is this new thing that we pivoted into rather than the culmination of 8 years of platform building, building the software that you need, building the data integration techniques you need,” Luckey said.
Luckey added: “There’s so much you have to do to accomplish this dream of a soldier-born heads-up display that shows you where the baddies are, where your buddies are.”
Launched on October 13, EagleEye will be available as helmets, visors, and glasses. According to a press release, the devices will feature a display that Anduril says can overlay information, like the locations of a user’s teammates, onto their live battlefield surroundings. EagleEye will be powered by Lattice, Anduril’s AI software platform.
The startup is collaborating on the EagleEye product line with several companies, including Meta Platforms, OSI, Qualcomm Technologies, and Gentex Corporation, which have expertise in AR or ballistic helmets, per the release.
On Tuesday’s show, Luckey said that when the company talked about building these devices for soldiers six to seven years ago, people gave them the “side eye” and said it “sounds crazy.” They also questioned what Anduril was doing differently from Microsoft, which in 2018 won a US Army contract for the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) program.
“We kept investing. We kept building,” he said. “Who would have bet that eight years later, that Microsoft contract, that $22 billion contract vehicle for the architecture of the Army’s AR future would move over to Anduril?”
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Representatives for Luckey at Anduril did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
In February, the tech giant and Anduril announced they were partnering on the next phase of the US Army’s IVAS program.
“I’ve been definitely talking to my investors and reminding them that they told us that this was a moonshot that probably was not going to pan out,” Luckey said on Tuesday’s podcast.
Luckey founded virtual reality company Oculus VR in 2012, which he sold two years later to Meta for $2 billion in cash and stock.
Anduril, which was last publicly valued at $30.5 billion, has risen to the top of Silicon Valley’s latest crop of defense tech companies.
Two years into its founding, Anduril had contracts with more than a dozen Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security agencies. In March, the startup beat nine rivals to clinch a $642 million contract to help the US Marine Corps build anti-drone defenses.
Anduril’s products include autonomous sentry towers along the Mexican border and Altius-600M attack drones supplied to Ukraine in their hundreds.
