Sequoia-backed Mach Industries, the protection tech based by 21-year-old Ethan Thornton, landed a contract with the U.S. Military and has plans for its first manufacturing facility, Thornton informed TechCrunch.
The manufacturing facility might be 115,000 sq. ft in Huntington Seashore, California, the place Mach’s headquarters is situated, CEO Thorton mentioned. Whereas that seems like an costly zip code for a weapons manufacturing facility, Southern California – within the shadow of SpaceX – has develop into a hotspot for America’s burgeoning protection tech trade.
Mach can be saying it was chosen by the Military Functions Laboratory to develop a vertical takeoff precision cruise missile it calls “Strategic Strike.” This was a developmental contract that was awarded within the third quarter of 2024.
Thornton tells TechCrunch he and the U.S. Military are saying this contract now as a result of the expertise efficiently met its preliminary flight assessments final month.
As for the manufacturing facility, that’s one other space the place protection tech corporations like Mach, in addition to Anduril, are attempting to innovate. Mach’s manufacturing facility, which it calls Forge 1, might be considered one of many “decentralized” factories the corporate plans to construct.
“As an alternative of very centralized factories, we’ll construct many, many smaller factories to really have a survival protection industrial base,” he defined. The factories might be designed to take uncooked supplies via closing meeting.
Along with different as-yet-to-be decided websites within the U.S., he additionally hopes to have worldwide areas.
The Huntington manufacturing facility is already constructing each of the corporate’s essential merchandise, a weapon referred to as Glide and a brilliant mild jet-powered vertical takeoff and touchdown unmanned aerial automobile (UAV) referred to as Viper. Viper is thought for its utterly vertical takeoffs, requiring no runway, and Mach says it’s as much as 300 instances inexpensive to construct than conventional UAVs.
“Viper is manufacturable in that decentralized form of internet of factories, and that’s an enormous deal. You don’t require specialty tooling to make it, which implies that if the U.S. has to ramp up manufacturing, we gained’t depend on these centralized areas,” he mentioned.
Glide is a bomb deployed from a balloon-like automobile positioned on the fringe of area. That is supposed to present Glide extra vary (Mach claims it is going to have infinite vary to drop on targets anyplace on Earth) and likewise make it harder to shoot down.
Thornton says this primary manufacturing facility ought to at some point be capable of produce 1,000 Vipers and three,000 Glides a month.
Teen founder, $85M in funding
Mach Industries is a buzzy protection tech startup as a result of it was Sequoia’s first protection tech funding and likewise as a result of Thornton was a teen when he based the corporate.
He dropped out of MIT to work on Mach when he was simply 19 and shortly landed Sequoia’s Stephanie Zhan and Shaun Maguire as buyers. They led Mach’s $5.7 million seed spherical introduced in June 2023. A number of months later, in October, 2023, Geoff Lewis founding father of Bedrock Capital led Mach’s $79 million Collection A.
Whereas most of the protection tech trade’s founders are younger (Palmer Luckey was in his mid 20’s when he based Anduril) the impetus for this firm got here when Thornton was nonetheless in highschool.
“Again in highschool, I ran a wooden and metallic workshop to really bootstrap the corporate and begin making preliminary merchandise. After which in all probability the best threat factor I did, I dropped out of MIT – earlier than we had capital, or earlier than I had a workforce,” he mentioned.
Mach has since develop into one of many “it” corporations in protection tech. For example, it’s one of many handful of corporations that famed former Palantir recruiter Peterson Conway works with. It now employs dozens.