Ethan Thornton tries to do everything at once | TechCrunch

Ethan Thornton left MIT at age 19 to make weapons. The first, a hydrogen-powered system he prototyped with parts from Home Depot and Amazon, didn’t work — “hydrogen was just a bad bet in general,” he told me last week at TechCrunch. StrictlyVC Event in Los Angeles. Three years later, his company, Mach Industriesmanages six weapons programs and earlier this month closed a 300 million dollars Series C round at a valuation of $1.8 billion. The startup has now raised a total of around $485 million.

Thornton grew up in Burnet, Texas, a town of about 6,500, in a family with deep military ties. Around 2017 or 2018 – while he was still in his early teens – he began to become, in his own words, “really, really concerned” about the rise of China and what he saw as impending conflict between great powers. This concern eventually transformed into the belief that unmanned systems were poised to redefine warfare and that the United States was moving too slowly to respond to this opportunity.

In practice, by mid-2026, it looks like these six simultaneous weapons programs and a company that has a lot to prove instead of focusing on one thing, doing it right, and then expanding. Thornton is aware that Mach’s diffuse focus creates lingering questions for outsiders. “It’s very hard,” he said Thursday evening. But he doesn’t think defense rewards the kind of concentration that, say, launching a rocket requires. “It’s a chess game that you play with an opponent,” he said, “with hundreds of different products that need to be shipped if we want security.” Pick just one, he suggested, and you’ve already lost the game.

These are not simple products. Mach is working on a vertical takeoff attack aircraft, a long-range anti-ship missile, two stratospheric systems, a cheap surface-to-air interceptor designed to kill drones and — announced earlier this week — a 40-foot, roughly 4,000-pound Navy logistics and attack aircraft that takes off almost vertically and flies thousands of miles with a thousand-pound payload.

The latter is quite a leap for a company whose largest plane to date was around 13 feet long. And none of the six are yet in full production. Thornton says Mach has won about 13 government contracts, most of them at the midpoint of defense procurement — past initial design, through testing on a government range, but short of the manufacturing level that fewer than 10 industry-wide programs have ever achieved.

He says several systems are expected to be deployed operationally by the end of this year and that his goal is to bring three of the six systems up to manufacturing rate during that same window, which would mean going from hundreds of units per month to hundreds of thousands, in a factory that Thornton, according to Mach, plans to set up soon.

This is an aggressive schedule that adds to an already aggressive bet. But Mach’s underlying thesis is that the United States can’t manufacture faster than China and so it must outcompete it — find first-mover advantage, like Ukraine has against Russia, despite being overproduced. “I don’t think we’re going to surpass China,” Thornton said. “What America continues to do well, time and time again, compared to China, is focusing on creativity and production. »

Thornton argues – as other defense technology startups do – that the real bottleneck lies not in the various platforms being built, but in the supply chain behind them. “The hardest part is getting the stuff into the building,” he said: jet engines, solid rocket engines, radars. Mach built and fired two jet engines from scratch in about eight months, a process he said traditionally takes four years; in May he also acquired a Solid rocket engine company, established 24 years agoExquadrum, for $50 million, beating out about eight other bidders, according to its own words. Selling components, not just vehicles, now accounts for about half of Mach’s revenue.

Mach’s approach differs sharply from that of some of his peers. Shield AI, founded in 2015, spent years primarily focused on a single product around its V-BAT drone before unveiling a second platform, the X-BAT autonomous fighter, last October – and even that is positioned as a large, deliberate bet, not a portfolio. Saronic, founded in 2022, builds only autonomous surface ships, scaling a unified autonomy stack across hull sizes ranging from six feet to 180 feet.

Both have been rewarded for this discipline: Shield AI raised $2 billion this year at a valuation of $12.7 billion; Saronic raised $1.75 billion to $9.25 billion.

Mach’s strategy most closely resembles Anduril – which is larger, older, and the only company against which all other defense technology startups are measured, fairly or not. Thornton makes the comparison himself, although he says there is a significant difference between the two companies. “The Anduril playbook was very top-down, starting with the software stack,” he said. “We do it in a very bottom-up way, starting with the hardware stack and then starting to wrap the software around it. »

It’s a distinction, certainly, but Mach still inevitably operates in Anduril’s shadow. Anduril raised $5 billion in May at a valuation of $61 billion – more than 30 times that of Mach – and landed a 10-year, $20 billion cap military contractor contract in March, consolidating more than 120 separate procurement actions. Whatever Mach’s plan was, Anduril achieved it years and tens of billions of dollars early.

Thornton emphasizes that this area is not zero-sum. He underlines the scale of the problem: China is said to be manufacturing around a thousand cruise missiles per day; the United States builds about one every three days. “Companies X, Y and Z could all build these things, but the production still wouldn’t be enough,” he said. He also says the Pentagon will not allow a monopoly, structurally, and will deliberately keep two or three suppliers alive in each category rather than picking a single winner.

Whether or not this is a generous reading of the competitive landscape, I point out that Anduril’s most famous co-founder, Palmer Luckey, has never, as far as I know, publicly acknowledged Mach. Thornton shrugs off any suggestion that Anduril might not be interested in making room for Mach, telling me that he respects Luckey and that they are “on the same team,” fighting for the same goal of Western sovereignty.

There’s no doubt that its investors, including Sequoia, Khosla Ventures and Ribbit Capital, don’t care. Remove the founder-prodigy framework – the Texas workshop, the MIT dropout story that every profile leads with, including this one – and what’s left is a genuinely interesting experiment led by a founder who seems, at least, to know what he doesn’t know.

Thornton has been frank that the hardest part of Mach’s operation changes every six months: first engineering, then sales, and now large-scale manufacturing, which he hopes to dominate next year. He says he tries to set aside four or five hours a day to think and “play against the future”, sometimes pulling his colleagues out of work to do it with him – which, he admits, “can sometimes frustrate them”.

On the question of who pushes him away — who keeps a growing founder honest — Thornton said the most valuable feedback doesn’t come from investors or even his management team, who may find themselves in the same echo chamber as the CEO. It comes, he says, from the people who actually do the work.

He described routine company-wide forums, his COO’s idea, where employees are given microphones and asked him anything. It all started when Thornton quietly recruited a few trusted colleagues to ask aggressive questions. It has since become something harder to control – and, he suggested, more useful. “Basically, I stand there for about an hour,” he said, “and people in the company ask me the most aggressive questions possible.” He seems to like it.

To learn more, you can watch our interview with Thornton below.