Matt Grimm

Matt Grimm is the co-founder and chief operating officer of Anduril , the founder responsible for turning the company’s engineering ambitions into delivered hardware. Where the public attention falls on Palmer Luckey and the strategy on Brian Schimpf and Trae Stephens, Grimm owns operations — the unglamorous work of building and shipping autonomous systems at scale.

He and Schimpf were classmates at Cornell University, where Grimm studied mechanical and aerospace engineering and went on to a master’s in systems engineering. Together they built Cornell’s autonomous-vehicle teams for DARPA’s Grand Challenge and Urban Challenge, the same early-2000s competitions that launched a generation of self-driving and autonomy engineers.

His career then ran straight through the defence-software world. After consulting for the Department of Defense at Booz Allen Hamilton, he became an early hire at Palantir Technologies, working in both operational and technical roles and deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan to make sure US forces could actually use the company’s tools in the field. That close contact with how software does — and does not — survive contact with the military shaped his approach to building products that have to work in combat. He also spent time at Mithril Capital, another Peter Thiel investment vehicle, before joining Luckey, Schimpf, Stephens and Joe Chen to found Anduril in 2017.

As COO he has been responsible for the manufacturing and operations side of a company whose entire premise is that a startup can out-build the traditional primes. Anduril’s growth into a multi-billion-dollar contractor rests heavily on that operational machine, which makes Grimm one of its quieter but more consequential founders.