Anduril Stock in 2026: Why Everyone Wants In — and Why Almost Nobody Can Buy It

After about an hour of driving south from LAX, you’ll arrive at Costa Mesa, a peaceful area of Orange County that was primarily known for corporate business parks and a few good taco trucks until roughly seven years ago. Engineers are currently building autonomous drones, which the U.S. Department of Defense increasingly views as critical infrastructure, inside a modest industrial campus off Red Hill Avenue. Anduril Industries is the company. It recently surpassed $84 billion in its private valuation. The majority of retail investors are still unable to purchase a single share.

The Anduril stock story’s defining characteristic at the moment is the disparity between access and demand. Anduril was founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, the same Palmer Luckey who created Oculus before Facebook acquired it for $2 billion. Over the course of nine funding rounds, including a $500 million Series G-1 that closed in January 2026, the company has raised about $6.96 billion. Shares of Forge Global were valued at $111.59 in their most recent indicative price. Orders closer to $67.96 are listed by Hiive. The spread itself indicates that this stock does not currently have a transparent market, and it won’t until the company chooses to go public.

The valuation truly makes sense in the product story. Lattice, Anduril’s primary software platform, combines sensor feeds from ground systems, drones, towers, and underwater vehicles into a single autonomous command layer. It sounds generic until you consider that Anduril sells as a single vertically integrated stack what Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman have traditionally sold piecemeal—separate hardware, separate software, and separate integration contracts. Last year, Bloomberg revealed that the Royal Australian Navy was deploying Ghost Shark underwater drones from Anduril’s Australian unit. Since 2018, the Sentry towers along the southern border of the United States have been operating covertly. The Roadrunner interceptor, designed to destroy low-cost enemy drones using a less expensive reusable one, is currently being discussed in several Pentagon procurement discussions.

Due to all of this, there is a strange issue: a surge of investors who are in dire need of exposure and virtually no legal way to obtain it. Buyers willing to pay markups of up to 40% over primary-round pricing simply to secure shares through secondary-market platforms like Forge and EquityZen were bluntly documented by Business Insider last month. According to BI, it’s similar to trying to get tickets to a Taylor Swift performance. To be clear, only accredited investors—those with a net worth of $1 million (excluding primary residence) or an annual income of $200,000 or more—are permitted to participate in the majority of these transactions. The doors remain courteously closed for everyone else.

Nevertheless, scams continue to appear. An explicit warning that nearly any third-party outreach offering “pre-IPO Anduril shares” is probably fraudulent can be found on Anduril’s own investor relations page, which has been updated over the past 12 months. This is something you rarely see on a private company’s website. According to the company, almost all employee stock is subject to outright transfer restrictions and rights of first refusal. This means that unauthorized transactions, such as the trendy “forward contract” structures being promoted by a number of private equity firms, may literally have no value at settlement. This is an unusually direct statement from a company that typically lets its lobbyists in Washington, D.C. speak.

Everyone genuinely wants an answer to the IPO question, of course. Palmer Luckey has stated in public that a listing is “definitely” on the roadmap, most likely on the Nasdaq sometime in 2026 or 2027. According to Sacra, a private-market research firm, Anduril made about $1 billion in revenue in 2024, more than doubling the projected $420 million from 2023. Speculative ticker reservations include “ANDL” and “ANDR.” The IPO window narrows significantly if that trajectory continues through 2026. This is because underwriters are drawn to companies that reach multi-billion-dollar revenue scales with strong defense budget tailwinds and a geopolitical environment that shows no signs of cooling. The business isn’t hurrying, though. According to the January 2026 Series G-1, management believes there is enough private capital to postpone the public markets until the figures are truly unquestionable.

There are proxies for ordinary investors who are confined to the sidelines. Anduril’s competitive landscape is touched by Kratos Defense, AeroVironment, and Palantir in different ways. Broad exposure is provided by the iShares U.S. Aerospace & Defense ETF (ITA). The AI-defense overlap is more prevalent in the ARK Autonomous Technology & Robotics ETF (ARKQ). They’re all not Anduril. They are all accessible, regulated, and liquid, which may be the more truthful response for the majority of people given the current circumstances.

Ironically, the valuation will likely be much higher than what the January 2026 $84 billion figure indicates by the time Anduril does ring the opening bell. As this develops, there’s a feeling that the story being written about Anduril in Costa Mesa, Sydney, and the Pentagon’s secret back rooms will be the kind that influences a generation of defense investors. In some ways, it’s still unclear if anyone who isn’t a member of the recognized club can take part in the first act.