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Ethan Thornton dropped out of MIT at 19 to design weapons. The first of these, a hydrogen system he prototyped out of parts from Home Depot and Amazon, didn’t work \u2014 “hydrogen in general was just a bad bet,” he told TechCrunch last week. A StrictlyVC event<\/a> in Los Angeles. Three years later, his company Mach Industries<\/a>runs six weapons programs and earlier this month shut down a 300 million dollars<\/a> The Series C round is valued at $1.8 billion. The startup has now raised about $485 million.<\/p>\n Thornton grew up in Burnet, Texas, a town of approximately 6,500, in a family with deep military ties. Around 2017 or 2018 \u2013 when he was still in his teens \u2013 he became, in his own words, “really, really worried” about the rise of China and what he saw as a coming great-power conflict. This concern eventually escalated into a belief that unmanned systems were about to redefine warfare and that the US was moving too slowly to meet the moment.<\/p>\n What it looks like in practice in mid-2026 is six concurrent weapons programs and a company with something to prove, rather than focusing on one thing, doing it right, and then expanding. Thornton knows that Mach’s diffuse focus creates some lingering questions for outsiders. “It’s very difficult,” he said Thursday evening. But he doesn’t think the defense rewards the kind of focus that, say, launching a missile requires. “It’s a chess game you’re playing with an opponent,” he said, “with hundreds of different products that need to be delivered if we want security.” Pick just one, he suggested, and you’ve already lost the game.<\/p>\n These are not simple products. Mach is working on a vertical takeoff attack aircraft, a long-range anti-ship missile, two stratospheric systems, a low-cost surface-to-air interceptor missile designed to destroy drones, and \u2014 as announced earlier this week \u2014 a 40-foot, roughly 4,000-pound Navy plane that takes off nearly vertically and flies more than a thousand miles with a thousand pounds. payload.<\/p>\n The latter is a real leap for the company, whose largest plane to date was about 13 feet long. And none of the six has yet been put into full-scale production. Thornton says the Mach has won about 13 government contracts, most of which were in the middle stages of defense procurement \u2014 after initial design, in testing at a government test site, but not at the level of production speed that fewer than 10 programs across the industry have ever achieved.<\/p>\n He says several systems should be up and running by the end of this year, and that his goal is to have three of the six in high-speed production by then, which would mean going from hundreds of units a month to hundreds of thousands at a plant that Thornton said Mach plans to open soon.<\/p>\n This is an aggressive scale superimposed on an already aggressive rate. But Mach’s main thesis is that the U.S. can’t surpass China’s manufacturing, so it must transform it\u2014find a first-mover advantage like Ukraine has over Russia, despite its superior manufacturing. “I don’t think we’re going to surpass China’s production,” Thornton said. “What America continues to do well, time and time again, compared to China, is focus on creativity and manufacturing.”<\/p>\n