Two years ago, Vishaal Mali, Kai Yin and Aiden Jenkins left their engineering jobs at Anduril’s futuristic, high-ceiling office to spend their days in a two-car garage building defense tech startup Salient Motion. For 15 hours a day, the three men soldered airplane parts together, huddled around a propane tank heater (the only source of heat), and fielded calls from their eventual pre-seed investors — one of which was Anduril-backer Katherine Boyle, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Basically, it was a typical early startup experience: equal parts chaos and potential.
Their dream was to take on the bespoke airplane part industry by redesigning thousands of software-driven airplane parts, reusing code to allow parts to be faster and cheaper to produce. By May 2023, they had gained some traction and rented out a more traditional office space.
Then billionaire Palmer Luckey, Anduril’s cofounder and their former boss, declared he would take “no mercy” on the tiny startup.
In September 2023, Anduril filed a lawsuit against Salient Motion, a four-person operation at the time. Luckey’s company, which has raised about $3.8 billion according to PitchBook, accused Mali, Yin, and Jenkins of stealing Anduril code and repurposing it for Salient Motion. “Salient owns nothing worth licensing, because anything valuable in its code and other intellectual property was stolen from Anduril,” the lawsuit read.
The lawsuit took swipes at the Salient Motion co-founders, accusing them of sneaking investor meetings in the Anduril offices and skipping out on work days — even going as far to say Mali had “poor prospects” for promotion. In a company Slack message, Luckey himself said Anduril would have “no mercy” for anyone believed to be stealing Anduril’s intellectual property. Salient Motion countersued, denying it had stolen any intellectual property.
The lawsuits were settled in July; by September, Salient Motion closed a $4 million seed round led by Cantos Ventures with participation from a16z, AE Ventures, Hummingbird Ventures, and BoxGroup. It brought the company’s total funding to $12 million.
The lawsuit did, however, wreck the co-founding team. Yin left the startup early this year and is now suing the company to have his legal fees from the Anduril lawsuit covered.
But, clearly, not everyone agreed with Anduril’s assessment of the startup’s value.
Notably, a16z’s Boyle invested in Salient Motion’s pre-seed and seed round — despite the fact she has a long-standing relationship with the Anduril team. She counts Anduril co-founder Trae Stephens as a mentor and was an early backer of Anduril when she was at General Catalyst. “She didn’t have to be supportive, right?” Mali said. “But she was super supportive in terms of how to go about it, how to regulate your emotions.”
Ian Rountree, an investor at Cantos Ventures, acknowledged that, according to “optics from the outside,” it might have seemed like the fledgling startup was already stumbling. Behind the scenes however, “there was positive momentum,” Rountree said. “There was obviously, from the commercial side of things, a lot of appetite for what they were bringing to the table.”
Changing the aerospace industry
Mali said his time at Anduril gave him a firsthand peek at aviation contracting.
He was shocked by how aircraft manufacturers created mini-monopolies. For any given airplane, many of the parts can only be sourced from one manufacturer. That’s because many of the pieces are highly specialized yet ordered in low volumes, making it very costly to set up production lines and challenge the incumbents. At Anduril, “suppliers were just really difficult to work with,” Mali said, forcing Luckey’s company to produce many of the hyper specific parts in-house.
“Some suppliers will have a part in an aircraft they certified in like 1990 and they’re not going to touch it, because why would they? No one’s going to compete,” Mali said. “The aircraft is in service for 30 to 50 years, so they’re just bringing in money every year, making the same thing.”
That lack of competition has caused inflated prices on plane parts. Mali likes to point to a clip of Florida representative Michael Waltz, holding up a plastic bag of inch-long metal tubes used for airplane design. The cost of said bag? $90,000. In other cases, contractors were charging $52,000 for an airplane trash can.
The Salient Motion team wondered if they could reuse code from one software-driven specialized part to another, slashing the cost of creating a new FAA-certified design for each order. Mali gave the example of two parts with surprisingly similar code: a laboratory pump for flushing toilets and the mechanism for reclining business class seats. “These two parts have very different functions. They look very different,” he said. Yet, “we can reuse almost 70% of the same software between both parts.”
That’s because both parts rely on making a motor spin to work. “What we spent so long architecting is, how do you generalize motion control? How do you design it?” he said.
With a database of parts and the code they share, Salient Motion can offer clients parts in record times, reducing a typical two-year timeframe to under six months, Mali says. The company currently has about a dozen clients and, more recently, landed a “huge partnership” with a major aircraft manufacturer that he declined to name.
The company will use the new funding to increase their team from 12 employees to 20 and build out a factory in Torrance, Calif. The company has manufacturing partners to create some components, but Mali said they’ll assemble everything at the new factory. Mali hopes to get their first designed part through FAA certification next year.
As for whether Salient Motion will ever produce parts for Anduril, Mali was diplomatic. “It truly depends on our roadmap as a company,” he said. “We’re not going to not build anything for them.”