As Sequoia Capital’s first protection tech funding, Mach Industries is an trade darling, elevating over $80 million since its founding in 2023. Its founder, Ethan Thornton, now 21, started Mach as a teenage MIT scholar earlier than dropping out to focus full-time on his startup.
However a number of months earlier than touchdown a seed funding from Sequoia in the summertime of 2023, Mach had a serious setback: a hydrogen gun prototype it was constructing exploded, sending a whole bunch of items of shrapnel flying and injuring a crew member, Forbes first reported.
Chatting with TechCrunch throughout his look at StrictlyVC in San Francisco on April 3, Thornton addressed the incident publicly for the primary time, saying it occurred on account of a scarcity of security assets.
“On the time, we had been attempting to self-fund it, and we didn’t have the cash to kind of run these procedures the best way they need to have been,” he mentioned.
After the explosion, Mach Industries “basically shut down all work” till it raised funds from Sequoia Capital, Thornton mentioned. Now, with these assets secured, Thornton says Mach has a full security crew and is working with the US navy to develop new weapons.
The startup has additionally pivoted away from its preliminary give attention to hydrogen, a fuel that’s famously risky. Talking at StrictlyVC, Thornton mentioned hydrogen was “most likely a foul tech guess” that required additional improvement. However the pivot hasn’t fazed Mach–removed from it.
Now, Mach is constructing totally different sorts of weapons altogether, similar to a brand new cruise missile and a bomb known as “Glide” that may be fired from the sting of area. It additionally not too long ago landed a U.S. Military contract and introduced plans for a community of decentralized factories it calls “Forge.”
“Constructing numerous prototypes” is a key a part of why VCs have poured $85 million into the corporate, in accordance with Thornton.
“It’s not essentially my capability to construct this stuff, however extra so our capability to really work with the federal authorities to get applications of file constructed round them,” he remarked.