Trae Stephens, Co-founder of Anduril, on Building a new Defense Prime

We were excited to host Trae Stephens, Co-founder of Anduril & Partner at Founders Fund, for a fireside chat as part of our New American Frontier series.

Trae is Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Anduril Industries, a defense technology company focused on autonomous systems. He is also a partner at Founders Fund, where he invests across sectors with a particular interest in startups operating in the government space.

Previously, Trae was an early employee at Palantir Technologies, where he led teams focused on growth in the intelligence/defense space as well as international expansion, helping large organizations solve their hardest data analysis problems. He was also an integral part of the product team, leading the design and strategy for new product offerings. While at Palantir, Trae also served as an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown University.

Prior to Palantir, Trae worked as a computational linguist building enterprise solutions to Arabic/Persian name matching and data enrichment within the United States Intelligence community. He began his career working in the office of then Congressman Rob Portman and in the Political Affairs Office at the Embassy of Afghanistan in Washington, D.C. immediately following the installation of Hamid Karzai’s transitional government. Trae graduated from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.