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 advised TechCrunch.
The manufacturing facility will probably be 115,000 sq. toes in Huntington Seaside, California, the place Mach’s headquarters is positioned, CEO Thorton mentioned. Whereas that appears like an costly zip code for a weapons manufacturing facility, Southern California – within the shadow of SpaceX – has change into a hotspot for America’s burgeoning protection tech business.
Mach can also be asserting it was chosen by the Army Applications 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 asserting this contract now as a result of the know-how efficiently met its preliminary flight exams final month.
As for the manufacturing facility, that’s one other space the place protection tech firms like Mach, in addition to Anduril, are attempting to innovate. Mach’s manufacturing facility, which it calls Forge 1, will probably be one in every of many “decentralized” factories the corporate plans to construct.
“As an alternative of very centralized factories, we are going to construct many, many smaller factories to really have a survival protection industrial base,” he defined. The factories will probably be designed to take uncooked supplies by way of ultimate 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 fundamental merchandise, a weapon referred to as Glide and an excellent gentle jet-powered vertical takeoff and touchdown unmanned aerial automobile (UAV) referred to as Viper. Viper is understood for its fully 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 kind of net 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 received’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 offer Glide extra vary (Mach claims it’s going to have infinite vary to drop on targets anyplace on Earth) and likewise make it tougher to shoot down.
Thornton says this primary manufacturing facility ought to someday have the ability to 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 traders. They led Mach’s $5.7 million seed spherical announced in June 2023. Just a few months later, in October, 2023, Geoff Lewis founding father of Bedrock Capital led Mach’s $79 million Collection A.
Whereas lots of the protection tech business’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 steel workshop to really bootstrap the corporate and begin making preliminary merchandise. After which most likely the very best threat factor I did, I dropped out of MIT – earlier than we had capital, or earlier than I had a staff,” he mentioned.
Mach has since change into one of many “it” firms in protection tech. For example, it’s one of many handful of firms that famed former Palantir recruiter Peterson Conway works with. It now employs dozens.