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Beyond patriotism, there’s another huge reason to join a defense startup: it pays really, really well.
Thanks to The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA), we can see the total compensation that defense tech startup Anduril, valued at $14 billion valuation, pays its top employees. The act requires the company to report the top compensations after the company has received at least 80 percent of its annual gross revenues from federal awards and has made at least $25 million in annual gross revenues from these awards. (Anduril reportedly told investors its revenue reached $500 million last year.)
The data in this report, which includes the compensation numbers that Anduril itself discloses, is published on the government contracting database USASpending.gov. The website does not, however, list what year the executive compensation covers. Sources with knowledge of defense contracting told us that compensation disclosures typically correlate to the previous year prior to the date a contract was modified. Therefore, if a contract was modified in 2023, the compensation data is most likely from 2022. To estimate the year of the compensation TechCrunch analyzed data from 26 Anduril contracts between 2021 to 2024 and correlated these contracts to the previous year. Anduril declined to comment on the time period covered by their compensation disclosures in these reports.
An Anduril spokesperson did, however, tell us that these figures do not necessarily represent the sums that execs earn every year.
“The reporting requirements behind these numbers are based on rules designed for publicly traded defense companies and don’t account for the complexities of startup equity compensation,” the spokesperson told TechCrunch, adding that portions of these reported compensations include “the total value of multi-year equity grants that vest over four or five years and remain illiquid until an IPO.”
For FFATA reporting, companies have to include everything from bonuses to awarded stock to stock options. Anduril isn’t required to clarify what is cash versus equity, so these numbers likely involve more stock than cash, as is common in executive compensation packages.
This is similar to how public company executive compensation disclosures take place. Every year, public companies release an annual proxy report to the SEC that includes a summary compensation table. This table includes cash, bonus and an estimated value of stock options and awards set aside for the executive that year, even though they may be multi-year awards contingent on performance metrics, or other qualifying acts.
Still, the numbers give a peek at how Anduril, which has raised over $4.3 billion to date according to PitchBook, lures top talent away from big tech and from the government.
And the compensations paint a broad picture of how Anduril’s focus has shifted over the years. According to our estimates, in 2021, the list was almost entirely the company’s founders; by 2023, the top paid employees include two autonomous vehicle specialists and two political veterans.
Here are the top recent executive compensations as reported by Anduril:
Co-founder and CEO Brian Schimpf
$19,167,070
(estimated year 2021)
CEO Brian Schimpf spent nearly a decade as an engineer at Palantir before co-founding Anduril in 2017.
Co-founder and COO Matt Grimm
$13,767,823
(est. year 2021)
Matt Grimm was a part of Anduril’s founding team and now acts as the startup’s COO. He is a former Palantir engineer.
Co-founder Palmer Luckey
$10,923,494
(est. year 2021)
Palmer Luckey sold his virtual reality company Oculus VR to Facebook in 2014 for around $2 billion. He left the company on bitter terms three years later and went on to co-found Anduril.
Former CFO Michael Galvin
$4,248,586
(est. year 2021)
Michael Galvin was CFO at Anduril for two years before leaving the company, according to his LinkedIn. He currently serves as an advisor to several companies, like defense tech startup Mach Industries and cybersecurity firm Vectra AI.
Senior VP Tom Keane
$3,306,500
(est. year 2022)
Tom Keane was previously a heavy hitter at Microsoft, where he led the teams that built out Office 365 and Azure. But after two decades there, he packed up and became senior vice president at Anduril in December 2022, where he’s focused on “building large scale distributed systems capabilities,” according to his LinkedIn.
Former Senior VP Adnan Esmail
$3,279,684
(est. year 2023)
Adnan Esmail was previously at Tesla for four years, spending some of that time working on autonomous driving. He joined Anduril in 2018, eventually becoming a senior vice president of engineering. He left Anduril earlier this year to start his own AI company, Physical Intelligence, according to his LinkedIn.
VP Burhan Muzaffar
$3,125,757
(est. year 2023)
Burhan Muzaffar spent two years at the self-driving car company, Aurora. In 2023, he became vice president of vehicle autonomy and head of robotics at Anduril.
Senior VP Shane Arnott
$2,953,279
(est. year 2023)
Shane Arnott spent over two decades at Boeing before joining Anduril as a chief engineer in 2021. He then became a senior vice president of programs and engineering in late 2022, according to his LinkedIn.
Senior VP Zachary Mears
$2,580,020
(est. year 2023)
Zachary Mears joined Anduril as the head of strategy in growth in 2021, before being promoted to senior vice president in March 2023, according to his LinkedIn. Previously, he ran public policy operations at law firm Covington & Burling LLP and did a stint at the Department of Defense.
CSO Christian Brose
$2,350,982
(est. year 2023)
Christian Brose has extensive experience on the Hill; from 2009 to 2014, he served as a national security advisor to Senator John McCain. For the next few years, he was staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee. In 2018, he traded in his government salary for this well-paid gig as Anduril’s chief strategy officer.
Senior VP Shane Arnott
$2,209,333
(est. year 2022)
For the three years of executive compensation that TechCrunch analyzed, Arnott was the only employee to be top paid two years in a row.
Former Senior VP Andrea Lessard
$2,009,116
(est. year 2022)
Andrea Lessard was the senior vice president of people and culture at Anduril, before leaving in April 2023 after less than a year, according to her LinkedIn.
VP Lindsay Trice
$1,737,175
(est. year 2022)
Lindsay Trice spent over six years at Palantir before joining Anduril in 2020, initially as head of product, and then a vice president of engineering, according to her LinkedIn.
Senior VP Gokul Subramanian
$1,632,514
(est. year 2022)
Gokul Subramanian is another Palantir alum. He is currently senior vice president of engineering, working on software products.
Co-founder Joseph Chen
$1,449,812
(est. year 2021)
Joseph Chen was an early employee at Luckey’s Oculus VR before joining Anduril’s founding team. Previously, he served as a paratrooper in the US Army.
