Anduril CFO Babak Siavoshy on the finance function of the future

Anduril, the $14-billion dollar defense company founded in 2017, is known for rapid innovation. Just last month, the company announced a new line of autonomous cruise missiles and a ground-breaking partnership with Microsoft to improve frontline threat detection.

In a recent conversation with Ramp CEO Eric Glyman, its CFO Babak Siavoshy shared how the company is disrupting a slow-moving industry and what it means to be a high-impact CFO in the age of data and AI.

Disruption comes from knowing what makes customers tick

Before Babak became CFO, he was Anduril’s Chief Legal Officer. He joined the company in 2018 as employee #20, overseeing critical areas like M&A and pricing. His unconventional career path proves a finance degree isn’t always required to succeed as a finance leader—an obsession with understanding every part of the business is.

“You have to understand what makes the customer tick,” Babak says. “You have to get the broader market, your products, and how they scale. You have to go deep into the data of why it works on an ROI and internal rate-of-return basis.”

Babak’s desire to connect with customers wasn't just ideological. It led him to one of his first major initiatives early on: implementing SaaS-like pricing for Anduril’s products. Traditional defense vendors operate on cost-plus contracts, in which they charge a fee and are reimbursed for all expenses to build made-to-order solutions that can’t be easily updated. In contrast, selling software and hardware as a service allows Anduril to future-proof its products by providing constant updates to address emerging threats. The company reinvests recurring revenue and the higher margins that it sees back into research and development, allowing it to further its mission to provide the U.S. and allied military forces with advanced technology.

The result is more durable systems, higher customer satisfaction, and a lower total cost of ownership.

Use financial data to build consensus

As Anduril grows, Babak relies on data to ensure quick decisions and high quality. “At scale, financial data becomes an area of shared consensus around what matters at a company,” he explains. “Part of my team’s role is to understand the financial lens needed for decisions and track that data at a great level of detail and as real time as possible to get feedback to management.”

Analyzing data requires deep thinking, which is why Babak prioritizes tools that free up time. “One way to think about the finance role is as using past information to make future predictions. That’s both an art and a science,” says Babak. “The science is planning, pulling data, and so on. The art is strategic analysis.”

As it turns out, that art is good for the bottom line. The more time teams spend thinking about strategy, the faster they get aligned. Babak stresses, “The risk with organizations as they grow bigger and more complex is that you’re spending less time than you should thinking about substantive issues—which is actually the key differentiator.”

Focus AI on “80% use cases” to save time and money

Babak’s appetite for deep thinking makes him bullish about AI. He's spoken at length about its potential to help teams do more creative problem-solving and strategy. If strategic analysis is the art of finance, “automation helps people spend more time on the art,” he says.

At Anduril, the team focuses on using AI for “80% use cases”—opportunities where the technology doesn’t need to be 100% accurate to save time. For example, Babak is exploring uses of AI to flag finance variances that his team can investigate further. With AI, “you’re giving an operator a smaller set of decisions so they can spend more time using their judgment,” he says. “Even if there are false positives or false negatives, this kind of AI is extremely useful to me and makes our team more efficient.”

Babak believes upcoming advances in AI will fundamentally reshape how finance teams operate. Instead of hiring people for tactical work like managing expenses, CFOs will increasingly prioritize specialized skillsets and judgment in team members. Babak especially values people who can be both strategic and detail-oriented, which he says helps build the trust and credibility that makes their entire company move faster. “Finance and accounting rely on human factors more than people think,” Babak notes.

Babak and Eric covered a lot more ground in their conversation. Watch this video summary for more highlights: