Palmer Luckey got kicked out of Facebook and built a billion-dollar defense company out of spite.

At 25.

Most guys that age are still trying to figure out their Uber rating. Luckey was reverse-engineering the Pentagon.

See, after Facebook ousted him from Oculus—the VR headset he built in his garage—Luckey noticed something. The U.S. military, the most expensive war machine in the history of planet Earth, was still using software that looked like Windows 95... but somehow worse.

Fax machines. Paper maps. Drones that would crash if you looked at them funny.

Luckey and others have pointed out that soldiers often used personal smartphones for tasks because military-issued devices were so bad.

And the usual suspects—Raytheon, Lockheed, Northrop—weren’t fixing it. They were too busy wining and dining Pentagon officials, dragging out contracts for years, and charging $11,000 for a USB stick.

So Luckey did what every disillusioned genius with VC numbers on speed dial would do.

He built Anduril.

Named after Aragorn’s sword in Lord of the Rings, Anduril is the blade reforged from the shards of Narsil (the sword that once defeated Sauron)—a symbol of building something from the broken past.

Anduril didn’t wine and dine its way into contracts. It built first, prove it works, and forced Washington to catch up.

And it worked.

Billions in defense contracts later, Anduril is no longer a rogue startup. It’s becoming the digital nervous system for America’s defense infrastructure.

But here’s the thing Luckey realized the hard way…

You can’t drag an ossified industry into the 21st century on hardware alone.

Early on, Anduril moved faster than government procurement systems could handle. Legacy defense funding, contracting, and banking channels weren’t built to support iterative, VC-backed innovation. And even as Anduril delivered results on the battlefield, financial bottlenecks—slow settlements, regulatory overhangs, compliance hurdles—created drag.

You need something more than just capital. You need rails, vaults, and infrastructure that moves like software, not paper.

The financial plumbing has to be reforged.

Enter Erebor.

Old Myths, New Money

Like Palantir and Anduril before it, Erebor isn’t just named after Tolkien lore. It’s part of a mythology for the coming battle over technology.

In The Hobbit, Erebor wasn’t just a mountain full of gold—it was a once-thriving stronghold turned silent. After the dragon Smaug took it, Erebor became a vacuum of power, purpose, and prosperity, casting a shadow over the entire region.

The surrounding lands suffered: the city of Dale was destroyed, trade collapsed, and the people lived in fear or poverty. Only when the mountain was reclaimed did balance begin to return.

Today, the hoard isn’t gold and treasure—it’s capital, custody, and code. And the dragon isn’t literal: it’s fragility disguised as legacy.

Similarly, Erebor isn’t just a “new kind of bank”…

It’s a response to a vacuum.

When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in 2023, startups found themselves locked out. They couldn’t make payroll. Founders were forced to pause R&D, lay off staff, or scramble for bridge loans.

Thousands of products were delayed, shelved, or defunded. Early-stage companies lost months of runway—critical in a world where timing is everything.

Erebor is stepping in to keep that from happening again.

Not by patching the old system, but by replacing it with rails designed for the digital age. No more waiting three days to move payroll. No more panic over frozen wire transfers. Everything happens on-chain, programmatically, and 24/7.

It aims to serve:

• AI startups
• Crypto projects
• Defense tech
• Advanced manufacturing
• Individuals working in or investing in those sectors

And it’s not just a concept whose time has come—it’s a serious team.

Jacob Hirshman and Owen Rapaport have been in the crypto-fintech trenches for years. Hirshman helped design USDC’s compliance architecture at Circle. Rapaport ran Aer Compliance, a crypto monitoring firm that got swallowed up by TRM Labs.

They saw firsthand how broken traditional banking was for anyone building in crypto, AI, defense, or frontier tech. Banks didn’t just move slow—they moved backwards.

Try telling Chase you’re raising money for an AI drone project using tokenized equity and stablecoin remittance flows. They’ll shut down your account before you finish the sentence.

So Hirshman and Rapaport built Ereborh—with a tech stack, a legal strategy, and a vision for a bank that speaks fluent code.

Luckey became the first backer, not just for ideological reasons, but because he saw how fragile the capital stack was for critical infrastructure. He saw the same thing in fintech that he saw in defense: the incumbents were fat, slow, and hostile to innovation.