Anduril and DRA announce multi-year deal to deploy AI-native manufacturing software across Anduril's factories

Summary

Anduril Industries and DRA have signed a multi-year agreement to deploy DRA's AI-native Build OS platform across all of Anduril's manufacturing facilities, including the forthcoming Arsenal 1 campus in Columbus, Ohio. The deal formalizes a two-year working relationship that began when Matt Grim, co-founder and COO of Anduril, cold-contacted Phil, co-founder and CEO of DRA, after a Build OS demo circulated in manufacturing tech circles.

The Core Efficiency Case

The headline metric is an 87.5% reduction in the time required to translate a CAD model into actionable factory floor work instructions, compressing the process from 12 hours to 90 minutes. For a company like Anduril — which runs thousands of design engineers against many thousands of factory floor workers across multiple product lines and geographies — that compression is operationally significant. Anduril recently passed 7,000 employees total.

The problem Build OS solves is structural: every design change, however minor, requires updated work instructions. Under manual processes, those updates are batched on cycles of roughly annual or biannual cadence, meaning production lines routinely operate on outdated information. A single mismatched bracket or wrong bolt spec can halt an assembly station and cascade backwards through the line.

Anduril's Product Complexity Amplifies the Need

Anduril operates approximately 30 core products but hundreds of individual variants. A customer in Australia may require a different radio bracket than a US military customer; a Dive XL configured for sonar differs from one fitted for mine-sweeping. The body, wings, engine, and power module may be identical, but a changed seeker-head sensor means an entirely new instruction set and retraining for floor workers. Build OS is positioned to manage that combinatorial explosion automatically rather than manually.

Arsenal 1, Columbus

The Ohio factory is the most concrete near-term deployment. Anduril has already hired approximately 30 Ohioans, brought them to California headquarters for roughly six months of training on early Fury production, and is returning them to Columbus this month to stand up the line. The first building — just under 800,000 square feet — is complete, with internal fit-out and equipment provisioning underway. Fury production begins this summer. The full Arsenal 1 campus is planned at roughly a dozen buildings totaling approximately 5 million square feet, with a new building coming online roughly every year for the next seven to eight years. The Fury line itself will run 22 stations in a sequential assembly format.

Strategic Framing Beyond Anduril

Grim frames the DRA partnership as a signal to Anduril's supply chain and government customers simultaneously. Anduril has been pitching DRA's platform directly to Navy and Air Force customers as evidence of AI-enabled manufacturing maturity, and describes it as having functioned as an unexpected sales accelerant — helping procurement officials understand tangible AI applications across autonomy, manufacturing, and back-office operations.

Phil positions DRA's addressable market well beyond defense, citing active deployments in aerospace, automotive, agriculture and construction machinery, maritime, and increasingly data center construction. Data center builders are migrating away from architecture-oriented BIM tools toward manufacturing-oriented design and build systems, and are approaching DRA to manage global-scale rack assembly workflows — a meaningful market signal.

Labor and the Workforce Thesis

On the talent side, Anduril reports no meaningful competition from data centers for factory floor technicians, noting that large data center facilities employ relatively few people in day-to-day operations. Construction-side labor — electricians, concrete work, heavy equipment — is more contested. Anduril is investing in curriculum partnerships with Ohio universities, trade schools, and community colleges, targeting skills in additive manufacturing, welding, CNC programming, and electronics assembly, with the expectation that program graduates will feed hiring pipelines within a few years.

DRA's platform carries an embedded workforce thesis: 3D interactive animated work instructions lower the skill threshold required for assembly roles, allowing companies to hire less experienced technicians while simultaneously codifying institutional knowledge before veteran workers retire. The industrial knowledge-preservation angle — capturing 30-year veterans' tribal expertise before it walks out the door — is framed as a systemic risk for the broader US supplier base, not just Anduril.

Maintenance and Repair as the Next Frontier

Both companies flag MRO (maintenance, repair, and overhaul) as the natural extension of the Build OS roadmap. DRA's position is that assembly instructions and repair instructions should derive from a single unified model rather than exist as separate documentation domains. Automating maintenance and repair instructions — including field repair of deployed drones — is described as an active area of development and customer conversation.