Ethan Thornton dropped out of MIT at 19 to build weapons. His first attempt, a hydrogen-powered system prototyped with parts from Home Depot and Amazon, failed. "Hydrogen was just a bad bet," he told TechCrunch at the StrictlyVC event in Los Angeles. Three years later, his company Mach Industries runs six weapons programs and closed a $300 million Series C round at a $1.8 billion valuation, bringing total funding to roughly $485 million.
Thornton, who grew up in Burnet, Texas, in a family with deep military ties, became convinced in his early teens that China posed a threat and that unmanned systems were the future of warfare. Now, in mid-2026, Mach Industries is working on six simultaneous programs: a vertical-takeoff strike aircraft, a long-range anti-ship missile, two stratospheric systems, a cheap surface-to-air interceptor for drones, and a Navy logistics-and-strike aircraft measuring 40 feet and roughly 4,000 pounds, capable of flying over a thousand miles with a thousand-pound payload. This last one is a major leap from Mach's previous largest aircraft, about 13 feet long. None of the six is in full-rate production yet. Thornton says Mach has won around 13 government contracts, most in the middle stage of defense procurement.
Sponsored Protocol
Scaling Production and Supply Chain Challenges
Thornton expects several systems to be operationally deployed by year-end and aims to push three of the six into rate manufacturing, moving from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of units per month at a new factory. His thesis: the US cannot out-manufacture China, but it can out-create it. "The thing America continues to do well is creativity and productization," he stated. The true bottleneck, according to Thornton, is the supply chain: jet engines, solid rocket motors, radar. Mach built and test-fired two jet engines from scratch in about eight months, a process that traditionally takes four years. In May, the company acquired Exquadrum, a 24-year-old solid rocket motor firm, for $50 million, beating out eight other bidders. Selling components now accounts for about half of Mach's revenue.
Sponsored Protocol
Competition: Shield AI, Saronic, and Anduril Dominate the Sector
Mach's approach differs from competitors like Shield AI, which spent years focusing on a single drone, or Saronic, which builds only autonomous vessels. Both have raised billions at high valuations. Mach more closely resembles Anduril but with a hardware-first rather than software-first focus. Anduril, valued at $61 billion, raised $5 billion in May and landed a 10-year, $20 billion ceiling Army contract. Thornton downplays competition, emphasizing the massive scale of the problem. "If China builds a thousand cruise missiles a day and the US builds one every three days, there's not enough production," he said. Moreover, the Pentagon tends to keep two or three vendors in each category.
Thornton acknowledges the difficulty of managing six programs simultaneously. He protects four or five hours daily to think and "war game the future," sometimes pulling colleagues in, which can frustrate them. The most valuable feedback, he says, comes from company-wide forums where employees ask tough questions. "I stand up there for an hour and get asked the most aggressive questions," he explained. He seems to relish it. Mach Industries represents an intriguing experiment: a young founder who knows what he doesn't know and aims to build a defense company capable of competing with industry giants. While companies like Anthropic attract talent such as Nobel laureate John Jumper from DeepMind, Thornton focuses on military hardware, with the goal of deploying his weapons by year-end.
Sponsored Protocol
For more details, the original TechCrunch report provides comprehensive coverage. Mach's challenge is ambitious, but Thornton believes American creativity can outpace Chinese manufacturing.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/21/ethan-thornton-is-trying-to-do-everything-all-at-once
