Brian Schimpf

Brian Schimpf is the co-founder and chief executive of Anduril , and the engineer quietly running what has become one of the largest defence-technology startups in the United States. If Palmer Luckey is the company’s public face, Schimpf is its operating core — the founder the others agreed should be CEO from the outset.

His path into the field started at Cornell University, where he studied operations research and industrial engineering and, with classmate Matt Grimm, built the school’s autonomous-vehicle team for DARPA’s Grand Challenge and Urban Challenge — the early-2000s competitions that seeded much of today’s self-driving and autonomous-systems talent. He published technical papers on autonomous vehicles before leaving for industry.

Out of Cornell he joined Palantir Technologies, then a young company selling data-analysis software to the intelligence and defence world. There he built the Foundry product, deployed worldwide, and climbed to director of engineering, leading the engineering and product organisations across government customers. That experience — selling hard software into a slow procurement system — became the founding premise of Anduril when he and Luckey, Trae Stephens, Matt Grimm and Joe Chen started it in 2017.

As CEO, Schimpf has concentrated on engineering and execution: shipping the Lattice software that fuses sensors and autonomous systems into a single operating picture, and the hardware around it. Under his leadership Anduril has grown from a contrarian startup into a multi-billion-dollar contractor that bids against the traditional primes. He is, by reputation, the deliberately low-profile half of the partnership — the engineer at the controls of a company built to look more like a tech firm than a defence one.