How a hydrogen explosion led a teenage founder to become Sequoia’s first defense tech investment

As Sequoia Capital’s first defense tech investment, Mach Industries is an industry darling, raising over $80 million since its founding in 2023. Its founder, Ethan Thornton, now 21, began Mach as a teenage MIT student before dropping out to focus full-time on his startup. But a few months before landing a seed investment from Sequoia in the summer of 2023, Mach had a major setback: a hydrogen gun prototype it was building exploded, sending hundreds of pieces of shrapnel flying and injuring a team member, Forbes first reported. Speaking to TechCrunch during his appearance at StrictlyVC in San Francisco on April 3, Thornton addressed the incident publicly for the first time, saying it happened due to a lack of safety resources. “At the time, we were trying to self-fund it, and we didn’t have the money to sort of run these procedures the way they should have been,” he said. After the explosion, Mach Industries “essentially shut down all work” until it raised funds from Sequoia Capital ... Read full article.