Ethan Thornton dropped out of MIT at age 19 to build weapons. The first, a hydrogen-powered system he built with parts from Home Depot and Amazon, didn’t pan out — “hydrogen was just a bad bet in general,” he told me last week at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in Los Angeles. Three years later, his company, Mach Industries, operates six weapons systems and earlier this month closed a $300 billion Series C round at a valuation of $1.8 billion. The startup has now raised nearly $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 in his mid-teens — he began to become, by his own account, “really worried” about China’s rise and what he saw as a coming superpower clash. That concern eventually centered on the belief that unauthorized programs were about to redefine war, and that the US was moving too slowly to meet the occasion.
What it looks like in practice, in the middle of 2026, are those six weapons systems and a company that has a lot to prove instead of focusing on one thing, getting that right, and then expanding. Thornton knows that Mach’s focus on distribution creates endless questions from outsiders. “It’s very difficult,” volunteered Thursday night. But he doesn’t think defense rewards the kind of single-minded focus a rocket launch, say, wants. “It’s a chess game you’re playing with the enemy,” he said, “with hundreds of different products that need to be sent if we want to be safe.” Pick just one, he suggested, and you’ve already lost the game.
These are not simple products. Mach is working on a stand-off attack aircraft, a long-range anti-ship missile, two stratospheric systems, a cheap surface-to-air interceptor designed to kill drones, and — announced earlier this week — a 40-foot, nearly 4,000-pound Navy aircraft—and a strike that takes out a 1,000-mile high-paying aircraft and pays nearly thousands of miles.
The last one is a real jump for the company whose biggest plane to date is almost 13 feet long. And none of the six are in full production yet. Thornton says Mach has won about 13 government contracts, most of them sitting in the middle tier of defense procurement — the previous first design, to be tested at the government level, but short of the production scale less than 10 programs have ever achieved industry-wide.
He says several programs should see operational shipments by the end of this year, and that his goal is to push three of the six into production volumes in that same window — which could mean going from hundreds of units per month to hundreds of thousands, at a factory Thornton says Mach plans to erect soon.
An aggressive timeline placed on top of an already aggressive bet. But Mach’s basic idea is that the US can’t out-China and therefore has to out–gain a first-mover advantage the way Ukraine has against Russia, even though it’s outsourced. “I don’t think we will surpass China,” said Thornton. “It’s something that America continues to do well, time and time again, when compared to places in China in terms of creativity and manufacturing.”
Thornton argues – as do other defense technology startups – that the real bottleneck isn’t the various platforms being built – it’s the supply chain underneath. “The hard part is actually putting things into the structure,” he said: jet engines, solid rocket motors, radar. Mach built and fired two jet engines from scratch in about eight months, a process he says traditionally takes four years; and in May it acquired 24-year-old rocket car company Exquadrum for $50 million, beating out eight other bidders, according to it. Selling parts, not just cars, now makes up about half of Mach’s revenue.
Mach’s approach is very different from that of his peers. Shield AI, founded in 2015, spent years as a one-product company around its V-BAT aircraft before unveiling a second platform, the X-BAT fighter, last October – and that was positioned as a big, deliberate bet, not a portfolio. Saronic, founded in 2022, builds independent surface vessels exclusively, measuring one stack of independent units in all boat sizes from six feet to 180 feet.
Both have been rewarded with that discipline: Shield AI raised $2 billion this year at a $12.7 billion valuation; Saronic raised $1.75 billion to $9.25 billion.
Mach’s strategy is very similar to Anduril’s – big, old, and the one company against which all other defense-tech startups are measured, rightly or not. Thornton draws the comparison himself, though he says there are significant differences between the two companies. “Anduril’s playbook is very top-down, starting with the software stack,” he said. “We’re looking very high, starting at the hardware stack and then starting to wrap the software.”
It’s a difference, 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 Mach’s — and in March secured a 10-year, $20 billion contract covering 120 separate procurement actions. Whatever Mach was building, Anduril got there years and tens of billions of dollars earlier.
Thornton emphasizes that the field is not zero-sum. He points to the scale of the problem: China is reportedly building something like a thousand cruise missiles a day; The US builds about one every three days. “X company and Y company and Z company could all go and build these things and it wouldn’t be enough production,” he said. He also argues that the Pentagon structurally won’t allow dominance — that it deliberately keeps two or three vendors alive in each category rather than picking a single winner.
Whether that’s reading the generosity of the competing world, I put it to him that Anduril’s most famous inventor, Palmer Luckey, has never, as far as I can tell, publicly acknowledged Mach. Thornton dismisses any suggestion that Anduril is not interested in making room for Mach, telling me that he respects Luckey, and that they are “on the same team,” fighting for the same goal of Western supremacy.
There’s no doubt that his investors, including Sequoia, Khosla Ventures, and Ribbit Capital, couldn’t care less. Take out the frame of the prodigy founder – the Texas workshop, the story of the MIT dropout that every profile leads, including this one – and what’s left is a really interesting experiment led by a founder who seems, at least, to know what he knows.
Thornton has been adamant that the hardest part of running Mach changes every six months: engineering first, then sales, and now manufacturing at scale, which he expects to dominate next year. He says he tries to secure four or five hours a day to think and “fight the future game,” sometimes taking his colleagues out of work to do it with him – which, he admits, “can be frustrating at times.”
To the question of who’s pitching back to him — who keeps the fast-growing startup loyal — Thornton said the most important answer doesn’t come from investors or even his executive team, which may end up in the same position as the CEO. He said it comes from people doing work.
He described common company-wide forums, his COO’s idea, where employees would get microphones and ask him anything. It began with Thornton quietly gathering a few trusted colleagues to ask some aggressive questions. It has since evolved into something harder to control — and, he suggested, more useful for. He said: “In fact, I stood there for about an hour, and I was asked the most brutal questions by people in the company.” He seems to enjoy it.
For more, you can watch our sit-down with Thornton below.
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