Ethan Thornton dropped out of MIT at age 19 to build weapons. The first hydrogen-powered system he prototyped using parts from Home Depot and Amazon didn’t work. “Hydrogen has generally been a bad bet,” he said at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in Los Angeles last week. Three years later, his company, Mach Industries, operates six weapons programs and closed a $300 million Series C round earlier this month at a valuation of $1.8 billion. The startup has now raised a total of $485 million.
Thornton grew up in Burnett, Texas, a town of about 6,500 people, in a family with deep military ties. Around 2017 or 2018, when he was still in his early teens, he began, by his own account, to become “really, really concerned” about the rise of China and impending great power conflict. Those concerns eventually sharpened into the conviction that unmanned systems would soon redefine warfare and that the United States was moving too slowly to meet that moment.
In reality, what we’ll see by mid-2026 is six concurrent weapons programs and a company with a lot to prove instead of focusing on one thing, getting it right, and then expanding. Thornton recognizes that Mach’s scattered focus creates some persistent questions for outsiders. “It’s very difficult,” he volunteered Thursday night. But he doesn’t think defense compensates for the single-minded focus that rocket launches, for example, require. “It’s a game of chess where you play against your opponent with hundreds of different products that you have to ship if you want security,” he said. Pick just one, he suggests, and you’ve already lost the game.
It’s not just a product. Mach is developing a vertical takeoff strike aircraft, a long-range anti-ship missile, two stratospheric systems, a cheap surface-to-air interceptor built to destroy drones, and — announced earlier this week — a 40-foot, approximately 4,000-pound Navy logistics and strike aircraft that takes off nearly vertically and flies more than a thousand miles with a thousand-pound payload.
That last one is a real leap forward for the company, whose largest aircraft to date is about 13 feet long. And none of the six are produced at full speed yet. Thornton said Mach has about 13 government contracts under its belt, most of which are in the mid-stage of defense procurement, moving through early design and testing at government scale, but nowhere near the speed manufacturing stage that fewer than 10 programs across the industry have reached.
He said several systems will see operational deployment by the end of this year, and his goal is to push three of the six into speed manufacturing in the same window. That means ramping up from a few hundred to hundreds of thousands of units a month at the plant, which Thornton said Mach plans to start soon.
This is an aggressive timeline on top of already aggressive bets. But Mach’s basic thesis is that because the United States cannot outpace China in manufacturing, it must create to outpace China. In other words, Ukraine is finding a first-mover advantage despite its lack of production compared to Russia. “I don’t think we’ll surpass China,” Thornton said. “What the United States continues to do well compared to China is its focus on creativity and productization.”
Thornton, like other defense technology startups, argues that the real bottleneck is not the various platforms being built, but the supply chain underneath them. “The difficult part is actually getting things like jet engines, solid rocket motors and radar into the building,” he said. Mach built and launched two jet engines from scratch in about eight months, a process he said traditionally took four years. Also in May, it acquired Exquadrum, a 24-year-old solid rocket motor company, for $50 million, beating out about eight other bidders, according to its own announcement. Sales of parts as well as vehicles now account for about half of Mach’s revenue.
Mach’s approach differs significantly from that of some of his colleagues. Founded in 2015, Shield AI essentially spent several years as a single-product company centered around the V-BAT drone before unveiling its second platform, the autonomous X-BAT fighter jet, last October. Even this is being positioned as a big, intentional bet rather than a portfolio. Founded in 2022, Saronic builds exclusively autonomous surface vessels, scaling one integrated autonomous stack that spans hull sizes from 6 feet to 180 feet.
Both men were rewarded for their discipline. Shield AI has raised $2 billion this year at a valuation of $12.7 billion. Saronic raised $1.75 billion at $9.25 billion.
A company more similar to Mach’s strategy is Anduril. This company is bigger, older, and the only one where all the other defense tech startups are evaluated, fair or not. While Thornton argued that there were meaningful differences between the two companies, he did make a direct comparison. “Anduril’s playbook was very top-down, starting with the software stack,” he said. “We’re taking a bottom-up approach, starting with the hardware stack and starting to wrap around software.”
Yes. But Mach still inevitably operates in Anduril’s shadow. Anduril raised $5 billion in May at a valuation of $61 billion, more than 30 times that of Mach, and in March it secured a 10-year, $20 billion Army enterprise contract, consolidating more than 120 separate procurement actions. Whatever Mach is aiming for, Anduril has achieved it years and tens of billions of dollars earlier.
Thornton argues that the field is not zero-sum. He points out the scale of the problem. China reportedly produces a thousand cruise missiles a day. The United States builds approximately one vehicle every three days. “Company He also argues that the Department of Defense will not structurally allow for monopolies. What this means is that instead of picking one winner, we intentionally keep two or three suppliers in each category.
Whether that’s a generous reading of the competitive landscape or not, I told him that Anduril’s most famous co-founder, Palmer Luckey, has never, to my knowledge, publicly acknowledged Mach. Thornton dismissed suggestions that Anduril was not interested in making space for Mach and said he respected Luckey and that the two were “on the same team” and fighting for the same goal of Western sovereignty.
No doubt his investors, including Sequoia, Khosla Ventures, and Ribbit Capital, didn’t really care. Strip away the founder-prodigy frame (Texas Workshop, the MIT dropout story that follows every profile, including this one), and what’s left is a truly interesting experiment led by a founder who at least seems to know something he doesn’t.
Thornton is candid about the hardest part of running Mach: changes every six months. First engineering, then sales, and now large-scale manufacturing, which is expected to dominate the sector in the coming year. He says he spends four to five hours a day thinking and trying to “war-game the future,” sometimes pulling his colleagues out of work to join him. He admits this can “frustrate them at times”.
When asked who pushes him – or who keeps fast-growing startups honest – Thornton said the most valuable feedback doesn’t come from investors or his executives, who can enter the same echo chamber as the CEO. He said it comes from people who actually do the work.
He explained the idea of a COO, a routine company-wide forum where employees would take the microphone and ask him anything. It started with Thornton quietly recruiting a few trusted colleagues to ask aggressive questions. Since then it has evolved into something more difficult to control, which he suggests is more useful. “I basically stand there for an hour and get asked the most aggressive questions from people in the company,” he said. He seems to enjoy it.
To hear more, watch us sit down with Thornton below:
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