The Mach Industry, backed by Sequoia, a defense technology founded by 21-year-old Ethan Thornton, has signed a contract with the US Army and plans for its first factory, Thornton told TechCrunch.
The factory will be 115,000 square feet in Huntington Beach, California, where Mach's headquarters are located, CEO Thorton said. It sounds like the expensive zip code of a Southern California arms factory in the shadow of SpaceX, but it has become a hot spot for America's burgeoning defense technology industry.
Mach has also announced that it has been selected by the Army Application Institute to develop a vertical takeoff precision cruise missile called a “strategic strike.” This was a development agreement awarded in the third quarter of 2024.
Thornton reports that he and the US military are announcing the deal as technology successfully fulfilled its first flight test last month.
As for factories, it's another area where defense technology companies like Mach and Andrill are trying to innovate. Mach's factory, called Forge 1, will be one of many “decentralized” factories that the company plans to build.
“Instead of a very centralized factory, we will actually build many many small factories to have a survival defense industrial base,” he explained. The factory is designed to collect raw materials through the final meeting.
In addition to other definitive sites in the US, he also hopes to have an international location.
The Huntington Factory is already building both the company's main products, weapons called glides, super light jet-powered vertical takeoffs and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) called Viper. Viper is known for its completely vertical takeoff and does not require a runway. Mach says it's up to 300 times cheaper than traditional UAVs.
“Viper is capable of manufacturing in its decentralized kind of factories, which is a big deal. It means that if the US has to increase production, it doesn't rely on these centralized locations, because it doesn't require specialized tools to make it,” he said.
A Glide is a bomb deployed from a balloon-like vehicle on the edge of space. This is supposed to give you more range (Mach claims there is an infinite range to drop onto a target anywhere on the globe).
Thornton says the first plant should one day be able to produce 1,000 vipers and 3,000 glides a month.
Mach Industries Strategic Striking Vertical Ackoff MissleimageCredit: Mach Industries
Teen Founder, $85 million funding
Mach Industries was Sequoia's first defence technology investment and is a buzzy defence technology startup as he was in his teens when Thornton founded the company.
He dropped out of MIT to work on Mach, working on Mach when he was 19, and soon landed Sequoia's Stephanie Zhan and Shaun Maguire as investors. They announced Mach's $5.7 million seed round in June 2023. A few months later, in October 2023, Mach's $79 million Series A was founder of Jeff Lewis, founder of Bedrock Capital.
Although many of the founders of the defense technology industry are young (Palmer Lucky was when he founded Andrill in his mid-twenties), the company's driving force came when Thornton was still in high school.
“Back in high school, I ran a wood and metal workshop, actually bootstrapped the company and started making early products. And perhaps the best risk I did was drop out of MIT – before we had capital or before I had a team,” he said.
Mach then became one of the “IT” companies in defense technology. For example, former Palantir recruiter Peterson Conway works with one of a handful of companies. It currently employs dozens of people.