Full Anduril R&D Tour: Matt Grimm, Co-Founder & COO
Exclusive | Matt Grimm, Co-Founder & COO
FULL R&D TOUR
Matt Grimm, Co-Founder & COO of Anduril, walks us through Anduril’s headquarters in Costa Mesa—a rare, & possibly first-look, inside the physical systems that turn ideas into fielded products. We tour Building A, a 200,000 sq ft R&D facility with machine shop, composites, metrology, electronic warfare test environments, & a dev-test area designed to “break things” so the team can iterate faster.
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Grimm explains how Anduril scaled from a ~5,000 sq ft former lost-luggage garage (with mold and no bathroom) to a global footprint of ~7,000 employees and roughly 34–35 offices, while ramping production and operations.
We also get hands-on with key systems and platforms, including the Ghost Shark (XL-AUV) autonomous submarine program and Anduril’s distributed compute and command-and-control stack: Menace & Titan (in partnership with Palantir).
(P.S. Driving Menace-X was very fun.)
How the Co-Founders divide responsibilities at scale:
Matt Grimm, COO, runs the operational core, from facilities & security to supply chain, production, logistics, & sustainment
Palmer Luckey drives new product concepts & CONOPS while serving as Anduril’s most visible public figure
Brian Schimpf, CEO, sets strategy & evaluates global defense programs & timing
Trae Stephens, Executive Chairman, leads investor relations & owns marketing and design (ie. Ohio State, NASCAR)
This is Part 2 of 4 of our interview series with Anduril’s Founders, in addition to our compiled video, check them all out!
If it weren’t for Matt we wouldn’t have gotten this complete series together, everyone please say thank you to Matt.
5 Key Takeaways
Anduril’s speed comes from co-locating design, prototyping, testing, and measurement: engineers can iterate from CAD → part → test → redesign with minimal latency.
The dev-test philosophy is explicit: build environments to stress, degrade, and fail systems (salt water, vibration, temperature cycles, voltage, EW/jamming resiliency).
Grimm frames operations as the hidden constraint: global supply chain, logistics, fielding, and sustainment are what turns prototypes into scalable programs.
The campus itself is part of the system design: a 200,000 sq ft R&D building on a ~650,000 sq ft HQ footprint optimized for fast iteration and internal manufacturing of early runs.
Co-founder role clarity matters at 7,000 employees: Palmer (product concepts/public persona), Trae (IR + marketing/design), Brian (strategy/CEO), Matt (operations “guts”).
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Matt Grimm, COO Anduril
(00:49) Anduril HQ: 200K sq ft R&D building
(01:45) Ghost Shark XL AUV submarine
(03:20) Lost luggage garage to 7,000 employees
(06:05) Founders’ roles: Palmer, Brian, Trae, Matt
(08:25) Supply chain, production & logistics
(09:09) Anechoic Chamber: radar, EW & jamming tests
(10:25) Metrology Lab: precision part measurement
(14:37) Dev test area: saltwater, vibration, battery failure & more
(16:36) The COO that reads every Slack message?
(18:09) Machine Shop: custom fabrication
(20:51) CNC machining: Fury bulkheads and jet engine blades
(22:32) Drone frame evolution
(25:44) LA Times printing press campus history
(29:35) Driving Menace-X: mobile battlefield command center
(33:00) Titan: Joint venture with Palantir for Army
(34:24) Fury: Matt’s favorite product
TITAN: Anduril x Palantir
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