The co-founder and CEO of American miltech company Anduril, which supplies AI drones to the Ukrainian military, founded fintech startup Erebor. It has already raised $225 million at a valuation of $2 billion.
The co-founder and CEO of American miltech company Anduril, which supplies AI drones to the Ukrainian military, founded fintech startup Erebor. It has already raised $225 million at a valuation of $2 billion.
As Business Insider reports, Erebor is a digital bank focused on startups and cryptocurrency companies. It is being invested in by Founders Fund, a venture capital firm run by Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, and 8VC, led by another Palantir co-founder, Joe Lonsdale. The fundraising is still ongoing.
Erebor, like Lucky’s Anduril and Lonsdale and Thiel’s Palantir, takes its name from author J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings books. In the book, Erebor is «The Lonely Mountain,» a kingdom of dwarves known for its treasures.
The startup recently applied for a banking license in the US, which will allow it to operate as a regulated bank. Erebor plans to provide services such as cryptocurrency-backed lending to startups and cryptocurrency clients.
Palmer Luckey also heads Anduril Industries, which he founded in June and which has already raised $2.5 billion at a valuation of $30.5 billion. He also founded virtual reality company Oculus in 2012 at the age of 19 and sold it to Facebook (now Meta Platforms) for $2 billion.
Recently, Lucky stated that his company’s weapons helped destroy hundreds of millions of dollars of Russian military equipment, and Anduril did some of the «work» in Ukraine at its own expense.
In the winter of 2024, it became known that Palantir and Anduril were in talks with a dozen competitors, including SpaceX and OpenAI, about creating a consortium that would jointly participate in tenders for the execution of US government orders.
