Mach Industries, the three-year-old protection tech startup run by 22-year-old founder and CEO Ethan Thornton, has raised a $300 million Sequence C at a $1.8 billion valuation, the corporate introduced on Monday.
The increase practically quadruples the valuation of the corporate in a 12 months. In June 2025, Mach raised $100 million at a $470 million valuation. Different buyers embrace Bedrock Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Khosla Ventures.
The spherical was led by deep-tech fund Infinite Capital and Ribbit Capital, recognized for fintech and these days in scorching offers in every single place — from AI coding startups like Cognition to neoclouds like Crusoe.
Since constructing autonomous weapons is a capital-intensive trade, Thornton started actively fundraising a few months in the past, he informed TechCrunch, and shortly found that the spherical could be common with buyers.
“We went out to lift 200 (million {dollars}) and we have been extraordinarily oversubscribed at 200 and proud of the worth, so we determined to push as much as 300. We’re nonetheless oversubscribed on the 300 mark,” Thornton stated of the fundraising efforts.
Based in 2023, the expansion of Mach has been a wild trip for Thornton, who famously dropped out of MIT at 19 to start out the corporate. VC enthusiasm is excessive for a couple of causes. Apart from AI, protection tech is a scorching space for funding proper now as newfangled autonomous weapons and drone protection methods, show themselves in battle in Ukraine.
Mach has additionally turn out to be prolific in its quick time. The Huntington Seaside, California-based firm now has 5 autonomous autos in improvement: Viper, a jet-powered vertical takeoff car; Glide, a high-altitude glider able to launching weapons; Stratos, an airborne surveillance platform; Dart, a low-cost counter-drone interceptor; and Pike, meant for launching long-range munitions. Manufacturing is predicted to start subsequent 12 months on no less than three of those methods, the corporate says.
Plus, simply this week, it gained a Division of Protection contract to create a brand new, sixth car that the startup has by no means mentioned publicly, Thornton tells TechCrunch. The contract is from the Protection Innovation Unit (DIU) to develop the Navy’s new “runway-independent strike plane,” because the startup describes it.
This will likely be for a really massive plane, Thornton says, that would have purposes within the business trade, too.
It has additionally grown from a couple of dozen workers in its first 12 months to about 350 workers immediately, has a 115,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Huntington Seaside, and design and manufacturing amenities in numerous different places.
“So by the top of this 12 months, in 2026, we could have introduced on 4 new manufacturing amenities,” Thornton stated.
However another excuse VCs wrote massive checks is that final month, Mach orchestrated an trade coup (excuse the pun) when it acquired stable rocket motor (SRM) startup Exquadrum in a $50 million cash-and-equity deal, as TechCrunch previously reported. It beat out upwards of eight different potential patrons, the startup stated.
There’s an acute scarcity of SRMs as drones create unprecedented demand in a market managed by two of the main prime protection contractors, Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman. The lead instances for buying can stretch years.
With this purchase, Mach controls its personal future for rocket motors and in addition launched a brand new business enterprise, Mach Energetics, to promote the engines. Whereas Thornton declined to share income, he stated the present combine is 50/50 between promoting to the federal government and promoting to different firms.
Thornton remembers a second final 12 months when all of the quick development of the corporate actually hit him. Two years in the past, the all-hands conferences have been held within the convention room with “like 12 folks,” he stated. “At our two-year celebration we had like 200 plus chairs and it was standing-room solely.”
Nonetheless, he stated, he’s most pleased with the pace of product improvement. That’s, in any case, the complete purpose for his firm and for the protection tech trade. The concept with these startups, backed by tech VCs, is to deliver sooner, extra reasonably priced merchandise to the navy and associated business makes use of, versus the costly, bespoke choices that legacy prime protection contractors provide.
“Historically, it’s 4 years to construct a jet engine. That’s concerning the quickest you’ll find on this house. And we went from no crew to constructing a crew to a jet engine firing in about eight months,” Thornton stated.
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