Trae Stephens

Trae Stephens is an American investor and defense-technology executive who is a partner at Founders Fund, the cofounder and executive chairman of Anduril Industries, an early employee of Palantir Technologies, and the official who led the Department of Defense team on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential transition. He holds positions at Peter Thiel's venture firm, Thiel's original government-data company, and the defense startup the firm bankrolled, and his ACTS 17 Collective hosted Thiel's 2025 lecture series on the Antichrist.¹²

Intelligence Community Origins

Stephens entered Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service after the September 11 attacks, studying Arabic and security studies and graduating in 2006. He began his career in the office of then-Congressman Rob Portman and in the political-affairs office of the Embassy of Afghanistan in Washington, in the period following the installation of Hamid Karzai's transitional government. He then worked as a computational linguist inside the United States intelligence community, building enterprise tools for Arabic and Persian name-matching and data enrichment.²³

While in that intelligence-community role Stephens saw a demonstration of Palantir's software and left to join the company in 2008. Palantir had been founded in 2003 with early backing from the CIA venture arm In-Q-Tel, and Stephens joined as one of its early employees while the company was still small.³

Palantir

At Palantir, Stephens led teams focused on the company's growth in the intelligence and defense market and on its international expansion, working with large government organizations on data-analysis deployments. He was described as a forward-deployed engineer, the Palantir job category that embeds technical staff directly inside client agencies, though his function centered on managing the company's sales pipeline. He also served as an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown during the period.²³

His six years at Palantir, from 2008 to roughly 2014, overlapped with the company's expansion from a post-September 11 counterterrorism contractor into a fixture of the U.S. intelligence and defense procurement system. The relationships he built on the government side of that business carried into his subsequent venture-capital and defense-startup work.³

Founders Fund

Stephens joined Founders Fund in 2013 and became a partner in 2014, concentrating his investing on startups operating in the government and defense-technology space. His investing centered on the firm's defense and government portfolio, which grew into Founders Fund's distinguishing focus over the following decade.¹⁴

From the Founders Fund position Stephens became one of the principal architects of the firm's defense-and-government portfolio, and he has argued publicly that the defense-technology sector faces a coming shakeout in which a small number of companies, Anduril among them, consolidate the market. He sits on the boards of several portfolio companies and is affiliated with the Federalist Society.⁴⁵

Anduril Industries

Stephens cofounded Anduril Industries in 2017 with Palmer Luckey and a group of Palantir and Oculus alumni, taking the role of executive chairman while Founders Fund served as the first institutional backer. Anduril builds autonomous-surveillance and weapons systems, including the Lattice software platform, drones, and border-surveillance towers, for the U.S. military and border-security agencies.¹⁶

Anduril closed a 2.5 billion dollar Series G round in 2025 led by Founders Fund, which wrote a single one-billion-dollar check, the largest in the firm's history. Stephens became a billionaire on the strength of the round in June 2025. The round routed Founders Fund capital into a company Stephens had cofounded while he remained a partner at the firm writing the check.⁶⁷

The 2016 Pentagon Transition

In late 2016 Stephens served on President-elect Trump's transition team, where he led the Department of Defense landing team responsible for reviewing the Pentagon and staffing its incoming leadership. The placement put a Founders Fund partner and former Palantir executive in charge of the defense-agency transition for an administration that Thiel had publicly endorsed and helped staff, during the same period Thiel placed associates including Kevin Harrington onto the National Security Council.²⁸

Anduril, which Stephens cofounded the following year, went on to win contracts across the Defense Department and the border-security agencies whose incoming leadership the transition he led had helped review and staff.⁶⁸

Faith and the ACTS 17 Collective

Stephens is an openly Christian investor who has spoken through the Faith Driven Investor network about integrating his religious convictions with venture capital and defense work. With his wife, Michelle Stephens, he is associated with the ACTS 17 Collective, a San Francisco group that convenes technology figures around Christianity.⁹

The ACTS 17 Collective, run by Michelle Stephens, hosted Peter Thiel's four-part lecture series on the Antichrist at the Commonwealth Club in September and October 2025. The lectures were off the record, and a recording later reached the Washington Post, which reported on them in October 2025.¹⁰