GoKawiilEthan Thornton dropped out of MIT at 19 to build weapons. The first one, a hydrogen-powered system he prototyped with parts from Home Depot and Amazon, didn’t work out — “hydrogen was just a bad bet in general,” he told me this past week at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in Los Angeles. Three years later, his company, Mach Industries, is running 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 roughly $485 million altogether.
Thornton grew up in Burnet, Texas, a town with roughly 6,500 residents, in a family with deep military ties. Around 2017 or 2018 — when he was still in his early teens — he started becoming, by his own account, “really, really concerned” about the rise of China and what he saw as an impending great-power conflict. That concern eventually sharpened into a conviction that unmanned systems were about to redefine warfare, and that the U.S. was moving too slowly to meet the moment.
What that looks like in practice, midway through 2026, is those six simultaneous weapons programs and a company that has a lot to prove instead of focusing on one thing, getting that right, and then expanding. Thornton is aware that Mach’s diffuse focus creates some lingering questions for outsiders. “It’s very hard,” he volunteered Thursday night. But he doesn’t think defense rewards the kind of single-minded focus that rocket launch, say, demands. “It is a chess game you’re playing with an adversary,” 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 aren’t simple 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 logistics-and-strike aircraft that takes off near-vertically and flies over a thousand miles with a thousand-pound payload.
That last one is a real jump for a company whose biggest aircraft to date has been about 13 feet long. And none of the six is in full-rate production yet. Thornton says Mach has won around 13 government contracts, most sitting in the middle stage of defense procurement — past initial design, into testing on a government range, but short of the rate-manufacturing tier that fewer than 10 programs industry-wide have ever reached.
He says several systems should see operational deployment by the end of this year, and that his goal is to push three of the six into rate manufacturing in that same window — which would mean going from hundreds of units a month to hundreds of thousands, at a factory that Thornton says Mach plans to stand up soon.
It’s an aggressive timeline laid on top of an already aggressive bet. But Mach’s underlying thesis is that the U.S. can’t out-manufacture China so it has to out-create it — find the first-mover advantage the way Ukraine has against Russia, despite being outproduced. “I don’t think we’re going to outmanufacture China,” Thornton said. “The thing America continues to do well, time after time, compared to China centers on creativity and productization.”
Thornton argues — as do other defense tech startups — that the true bottleneck isn’t the various platforms being built — it’s the supply chain beneath them. “The hard part is actually getting the stuff into the building,” 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; it also in May acquired a 24-year-old solid rocket motor company, Exquadrum, for $50 million, beating out roughly eight other bidders per its own telling. Selling components, not just vehicles, now accounts for about half of Mach’s revenue.
Mach’s approach differs sharply from some of its peers. Shield AI, founded in 2015, spent years as essentially a one-product company around its V-BAT drone before unveiling a second platform, the autonomous X-BAT fighter, last October — and even that is being positioned as one large, deliberate bet, not a portfolio. Saronic, founded in 2022, builds only autonomous surface vessels, scaling one unified autonomy stack across hull sizes from six feet to 180 feet.
Both have been rewarded for that discipline: Shield AI raised $2 billion this year at a $12.7 billion valuation; Saronic raised $1.75 billion at $9.25 billion.
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