Defense startup Anduril Industries announced on Wednesday that it had raised $1.5 billion in its Series F funding round, valuing the company at $14 billion.

Anduril, the three-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company ranked No. 2 for 2024, said it will use the new round of funding to hire more employees, expand its infrastructure and strengthen its supply chain and processes. It said it will also use the funds to invest in Arsenal, a manufacturing platform that will power a new 46,000-square-foot factory called “Arsenal-1” capable of producing tens of thousands of autonomous military systems per year.

The new $14 billion valuation is an increase from the $8.5 billion valuation the company received following a $1.5 billion Series E in 2022. This latest round was co-led by Founders Fund and Sands Capital and includes new investors Fidelity Management & Research Company, Counterpoint Global and Baillie Gifford. Anduril has raised more than $3.7 billion to date.

Founded in 2017, Anduril seeks to disrupt traditional defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman by developing its products in-house and then selling them to customers, as opposed to the traditional military process of contracting first and then building them.

Last year, Anduril launched several new drones based on the AI-powered command and control software Lattice, which is used by the U.S. military and its allies to control human-assisted robotic systems in carrying out complex missions.

The company’s push to improve manufacturing processes for autonomous weapons systems comes at a critical time for the defense industry, which has been tested by the war in Ukraine. That conflict “exposed a critical vulnerability in the U.S. crisis response capability,” Anduril said. “Slow and low production rates, inflexible processes, and the development of sophisticated, defense-specific, customized systems have compromised the ability to respond quickly to needs,” the company said, noting that lead times for replenishment of key weapons and munitions average two years.

“These lower-cost, larger-scale, more intelligent systems – we believe they will determine which nations will be successful in the future,” Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf said in May on the show “Closing Bell: Overtime.”