Hermeus Selects Anduril to Bring Mission Autonomy to High-Mach Flight

Hermeus Selects Anduril to Bring Mission Autonomy to High-Mach Flight

Autonomy is driving a fundamental transformation of military aviation, enabling new concepts of operation that increase mission effectiveness without putting additional pilots at risk. Today, that transformation reached high-speed flight.

Hermeus, a defense aviation company focused on the rapid design, build, and test of high-Mach and hypersonic aircraft, has selected Anduril's flight-proven end-to-end mission autonomy solution for its Quarterhorse aircraft, a critical step towards unlocking coordinated, collaborative missions for a new generation of high-speed aircraft. Under the agreement, Anduril will integrate Lattice for Mission Autonomy with the Quarterhorse Mk 2 aircraft, enabling collaborative missions and providing a common human-machine interface for operators to interact with the aircraft across the entire mission cycle.

The agreement marks a significant strategic milestone for both companies. For Anduril, the agreement is the first commercial deal to integrate Anduril's mission autonomy solution with a third-party Group 5 aircraft, and a critical opportunity to validate our end-to-end autonomy software on a third-party high-Mach aircraft. For Hermeus, picking Lattice unlocks the next phase of testing for Quarterhorse as they work to rapidly demonstrate the operational relevance of the Quarterhorse platform. Pairing mission autonomy with high-speed flight will drive the next critical phase of military aviation - both of our teams are excited to make it real.

Since its founding, Hermeus has moved from concept to hardware in record time. Flying its first aircraft in 2025 and reaching supersonic speeds with Mk 2.1 just 364 days later, Hermeus became the fastest venture in aviation history to achieve supersonic flight. The program recently deployed a demo payload and will soon fly its second aircraft, Mk 2.2, built in under a year.

Fielding mission autonomy demands an end-to-end capability: warfighters must be able to engage with autonomous systems across the entire lifecycle of a mission, much as they do now with human teammates. Part of that is the software that enables multiple aircraft to collaborate autonomously to complete complex missions. Equally important is the interface - both software and hardware - that operators use to interact with autonomous systems, since it plays a central role in determining whether or not human operators will trust the system as a whole.

That end-to-end system is exactly what Anduril has built and refined over the last several years, repeatedly proving its performance across real-world operations and exercises with everything from launched effects to fighter aircraft. Lattice for Mission Autonomy sits at the center of that capability, providing an adaptive digital platform for users to engage with autonomous systems across the entire mission cycle. Operational analysis and threat modeling, training and rehearsals, pre-mission planning, mission execution, and post-mission debrief are all integrated within a single software platform. Operators will use Anduril's Menace-T C4 solution as the physical interface for those interactions with the aircraft - a capability that Air Force operators are already using to generate sorties with semi-autonomous aircraft.

By integrating Lattice, Hermeus is joining a larger family of autonomous systems capable of coordinated robotic flight. Anduril's end-to-end mission autonomy capability is already powering live flights of semi-autonomous fighter aircraft for the Air Force's Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program. By selecting Anduril to provide the first mission autonomy package for Quarterhorse Mk 2, Hermeus' decision is validating the CCA program's focus on modularity: by establishing a common Autonomy Government Reference Architecture (A-GRA) standard that ensures cross-compatibility between software and hardware, the Air Force is accelerating the development of a larger ecosystem of autonomous aircraft. The same software that is powering the current phase of the CCA program is now enabling a new generation of high-speed aircraft.

The Anduril and Hermeus teams are already working closely to integrate Lattice for Mission Autonomy with Quarterhorse and test the combined system's performance in advance of a first mission autonomy flight on Quarterhorse Mk 2 planned for 2027. Autonomy and high-Mach flight are driving parallel transformations in military aviation. Together, Hermeus and Anduril are realizing a new era of military aviation that combines autonomy and speed, unlocking new concepts of operation that will transform what's possible in military aviation.