\n<\/p>\n
Ethan Thornton dropped out of MIT at 19 to build weapons. The first one, a hydrogen-powered system he prototyped with parts from Home Depot and Amazon, didn\u2019t work out \u2014 \u201chydrogen was just a bad bet in general,\u201d he told me this past week at TechCrunch\u2019s StrictlyVC event<\/a> in Los Angeles. Three years later, his company, Mach Industries<\/a>, is running six weapons programs and earlier this month closed a $300 million<\/a> Series C round at a $1.8 billion valuation. The startup has now raised roughly $485 million altogether.<\/p>\n Thornton grew up in Burnet, Texas, a town with roughly 6,500 residents, in a family with deep military ties. Around 2017 or 2018 \u2014 when he was still in his early teens \u2014 he started becoming, by his own account, \u201creally, really concerned\u201d about the rise of China and what he saw as an impending great-power conflict. That concern eventually sharpened into a conviction that unmanned systems were about to redefine warfare, and that the U.S. was moving too slowly to meet the moment.<\/p>\n What that looks like in practice, midway through 2026, is those six simultaneous weapons programs and a company that has a lot to prove instead of focusing on one thing, getting that right, and then expanding. Thornton is aware that Mach\u2019s diffuse focus creates some lingering questions for outsiders. \u201cIt\u2019s very hard,\u201d he volunteered Thursday night. But he doesn\u2019t think defense rewards the kind of single-minded focus that rocket launch, say, demands. \u201cIt is a chess game you\u2019re playing with an adversary,\u201d he said, \u201cwith hundreds of different products that need to be shipped if we want security.\u201d Pick just one, he suggested, and you\u2019ve already lost the game.<\/p>\n These aren\u2019t simple products. Mach is working on a vertical-takeoff strike aircraft, a long-range anti-ship missile, two stratospheric systems, a cheap surface-to-air interceptor built to kill drones, and \u2014 announced earlier this week \u2014 a 40-foot, roughly 4,000-pound Navy logistics-and-strike aircraft that takes off near-vertically and flies over a thousand miles with a thousand-pound payload.<\/p>\n That last one is a real jump for a company whose biggest aircraft to date has been about 13 feet long. And none of the six is in full-rate production yet. Thornton says Mach has won around 13 government contracts, most sitting in the middle stage of defense procurement \u2014 past initial design, into testing on a government range, but short of the rate-manufacturing tier that fewer than 10 programs industry-wide have ever reached.<\/p>\n He says several systems should see operational deployment by the end of this year, and that his goal is to push three of the six into rate manufacturing in that same window \u2014 which would mean going from hundreds of units a month to hundreds of thousands, at a factory that Thornton says Mach plans to stand up soon.<\/p>\n It\u2019s an aggressive timeline laid on top of an already aggressive bet. But Mach\u2019s underlying thesis is that the U.S. can\u2019t out-manufacture China so it has to out-create it \u2014 find the first-mover advantage the way Ukraine has against Russia, despite being outproduced. \u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019re going to outmanufacture China,\u201d Thornton said. \u201cThe thing America continues to do well, time after time, compared to China centers on creativity and productization.\u201d<\/p>\n