These upstart defense contractors seem to live in a world of their own. I just saw that Palantir has a market cap larger than Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics, combined.
From The Register, February 12:
Will the Pentagon get Luckey with a new IVAS vendor?
Microsoft plans to quit developing augmented-reality headsets for the US Army and have Oculus founder Palmer Luckey's Anduril Industries take over the gig.
The software giant’s AR-for-Army project is called the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) and began in 2018 using hardware based on Microsoft's now-discontinued HoloLens headsets.
It hasn’t gone well. The Army signed a $22 billion deal with Microsoft for custom-made kit in 2021, but later that year delayed a roll-out of the headsets without providing much explanation other than to say extra time would give the Army and Microsoft the opportunity "to continue to enhance" the headsets.
A possible reason for the delay emerged in 2022 with the leak of a report that found soldiers wearing the modified HoloLenses suffered "mission-affecting physical impairments" including headaches, eyestrain, and nausea. The Army understandably asked Microsoft to revisit its designs.
Army officials had been skeptical of the need for IVAS early in the project, with the Department of Defense's Inspector General finding that the whole project might be a waste of money - and that was before the nauseating results of the 2022 tests.
By early 2023, Congress decided to yank funding for the program, telling the Pentagon it refused to fund anything but new hardware that didn't make soldiers sick. The DoD planned to test version 1.2 of IVAS in FY 2025 and a few of those headsets were tested by the Army in early 2024....
....MUCH MORE
Mr. Luckey founded Oculus VR at age 20 and two years later sold it to Meta for $2 billion in cash and stock.
Recently:
Drone vs. Drone: Palmer Luckey's "Anduril in talks to raise up to $2.5B at $28B valuation"
