McLean Advised Blue Force Technologies on Its Acquisition by Anduril Industries

McLEAN, Va., September 2023 — The transaction expands Anduril’s existing autonomous fleet to include large, high-performance group 5 aircraft and significantly increases its reach and impact within the Department of Defense. The McLean Group provided advisory services to Blue Force Technologies. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Blue Force Technologies designs and manufactures high-end composite aircraft and their components at its factories in North Carolina. Since 2019 the company has been developing Fury, a group 5 autonomous air vehicle with fighter-like performance. Fury leverages proprietary rapid prototyping, digital engineering and an open architecture designed to deliver next-generation flight performance with the flexibility to integrate heterogeneous sensors and payloads for air dominance missions.

The company recently completed a flight test of the flight software aboard a VISTA (Variable Stability In-flight Simulator Test Aircraft) and a ground test of Fury’s novel carbon fiber composite propulsion flowpath system.

“This, for us, is about building a different kind of industrial base that can support real large scale autonomous system production and fielding.”

Anduril is making significant investments to continue development of the Fury autonomous air vehicle, expand manufacturing operations in North Carolina, and accelerate development of technologies critical to future capabilities such as autonomous collaborative platforms. As a nontraditional company that uses its own capital for research and development, Anduril moves quickly to engineer, prototype, develop and produce new capabilities for the Department of Defense.

To project force, deter aggression and regain affordable mass, the DoD will need to rely on large quantities of smaller, lower-cost, more autonomous systems. The U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps have all signaled their intention to modernize and adopt advanced autonomous capabilities — an ecosystem that must be powered by software enabling a single operator to control multiple assets across a wide range of missions.

The acquisition follows Anduril’s launch of Lattice for Mission Autonomy earlier that year, an AI-enabled software platform that lets teams of autonomous systems dynamically collaborate to achieve complex missions under human supervision. By investing in both hardware and software, Anduril further accelerates development of manned-unmanned teaming and other advanced autonomous solutions.

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