Ethan Thornton dropped out of MIT at 19 to build weapons. The first, a hydrogen system he prototyped with parts from Home Depot and Amazon, didn’t work — “hydrogen was just a bad bet in general,” he told TechCrunch last week. StrictlyVC event in Los Angeles. Three years later, his company, Mach Industriesruns six weapons programs and earlier this month closed a $300 million Series C round at a $1.8 billion valuation. The startup has now raised around $485 million in total.
Thornton grew up in Burnet, Texas, a town of about 6,500, in a family with deep military ties. Around 2017 or 2018 — when he was still in his early teens — he began to worry, by his own account, “really, really” about the rise of China and what he saw as an impending clash of great powers. This concern eventually sharpened into a belief that unmanned systems were about to redefine warfare and that the US was moving too slowly to rise to the moment.
What it looks like in practice, mid-2026, is these six concurrent weapons programs and a company that has a lot to prove rather than focusing on one thing, getting it right, and then expanding. Thornton knows that Mach’s diffuse focus raises some lingering questions for outsiders. “It’s very difficult,” he volunteered Thursday night. But he doesn’t think defense rewards the kind of single-minded focus that, say, launching missiles requires. “It’s a chess game you play with an opponent,” he said, “with hundreds of different products that need to be shipped if we want security.” Pick just one, he suggested, and you’ve already lost the game.
These are not just products. Mach is working on a vertical takeoff strike aircraft, a long-range anti-ship missile, two stratospheric systems, a cheap surface-to-air interceptor built to kill drones and—announced earlier this week—a 40-foot, roughly 4,000-pound Navy jet that takes off with thousands of aircraft.
That last one is a real leap for a company whose largest aircraft to date was about 13 feet long. And none of the six are in full production yet. Thornton says Mach has won about 13 government contracts, most of which are in the middle stage of defense procurement — past initial design, to government-wide testing, but less than the production level reached by fewer than 10 industry-wide programs.
He says several systems will be operational by the end of this year, and that his goal is to push three of the six into pace production in the same window — which would mean hundreds of units per month to hundreds of thousands, at a plant Thornton says Mach plans to bring up soon.
It’s an aggressive schedule placed on top of an already aggressive bet. However, Mach’s underlying thesis is that the US can’t manufacture outside of China, so it must manufacture it – find first-mover advantage like Ukraine has over Russia, despite being a superproducer. “I don’t think we’re going to get past China,” Thornton said. “What America continues to do well, at times, compared to China is focus on creativity and productivity.”
Thornton argues — like other defense technology startups — that the real obstacle isn’t the various platforms being built — it’s the supply chain underneath them. “The hard part is getting the stuff into the building,” he said: jet engines, solid rocket engines, radar. Mach built and launched two jet engines from scratch in about eight months, a process he says traditionally takes four years. It also in May acquired a 24-year-old solid rocket engine company, Exquadrum, for $50 million, beating out about eight other bidders according to its own filings. Selling parts, not just vehicles, now accounts for about half of Mach’s revenue.
Mach’s approach differs significantly from some of his peers. Founded in 2015, Shield AI spent years as essentially a one-product company around the V-BAT drone before unveiling a second platform, the X-BAT autonomous fighter, last October — and even that is being positioned as a big, intentional bet, not a portfolio. Founded in 2022, Saronic builds only autonomous surface vessels, scaling a single autonomy stack in hull sizes from six feet to 180 feet.
Both have been rewarded for this industry: Shield AI raised $2 billion this year at a $12.7 billion valuation. Saronic raised $1.75 billion on $9.25 billion.
Mach’s strategy most closely resembles Anduril — which is bigger, older, and the one company that every other defense tech startup is measured against, fairly or not. Thornton makes the comparison himself, although he argues that there is a substantial difference between the two companies. “Anduril’s playbook was very top-down, starting with the software stack,” he said. “We’re very bottom-up, starting with the hardware stack and then starting to wrap the software around it.”
It’s a distinction, yes, but Mach still inevitably operates in Anduril’s shadow. Anduril raised $5 billion in May at a $61 billion valuation — more than 30 times that of Mach — and in March inked a 10-year, $20 billion Army cap deal that consolidates more than 120 separate procurement operations. Whatever Mach is building, Anduril got there years and tens of billions of dollars earlier.
Thornton insists that the field is not zero-sum. It highlights the scale of the problem: China is reportedly building something like a thousand cruise missiles a day. the US makes about one every three days. “X company and Y company and Z company could make all these things and it still wouldn’t be enough production,” he said. He also argues that the Pentagon structurally won’t allow a monopoly — that it’s deliberately keeping two or three vendors alive in each category rather than picking a winner.
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, as far as I can tell, Mach in public. Thornton dismisses any suggestion that Anduril isn’t interested in making room for Mach, telling me that he respects Luckey and that they’re “on the same team,” fighting for the same goal of western dominance.
No doubt his investors, including Sequoia, Khosla Ventures and Ribbit Capital, couldn’t care less. Take away the context of the prodigy founder—the Texas lab, the MIT dropout story that leads every profile, including this one—and what’s left is a genuinely interesting experiment led by a founder who seems, at least, to know what he doesn’t know.
Thornton was candid that the hardest part of running Mach changes every six months: first engineering, then sales, and now manufacturing at scale, which he expects to master in the next year. He says he tries to carve out four or five hours a day to think and “fight the future”, sometimes pulling colleagues out of work to do it with him – which, he admits, “can frustrate them at times”.
On the question of who pushes him back — who keeps a fast-rising founder honest — Thornton said the most valuable feedback doesn’t come from investors or even his executive team, who might end up in the same echo chamber as the CEO. It comes, he said, from the people who actually do the work.
He described the usual company-wide forums, his COO idea, where employees take microphones and ask him anything. It started with Thornton quietly recruiting a few trusted colleagues to ask aggressive questions. It has since evolved into something harder to control—and, he suggested, more useful for it. “I basically stand there for about an hour,” he said, “and get asked the most aggressive questions possible by people in the company.” He seems to be enjoying it.
For more, you can watch our sit-down with Thornton below.
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