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 ca …