At just 21 years old, Ethan Thornton is rewriting the rules of modern warfare. He’s the founder and CEO of Mach Industries, a fast-rising defense tech startup that’s just secured $100 million in new funding, co-led by Khosla Ventures and Bedrock Capital, with continued support from Sequoia Capital. This brings Mach’s total raised capital to around $185 million, and the company’s valuation now hovers around $470 million, according to TechCrunch.
Thornton left MIT to focus on Mach full-time, TechCrunch reported, but the company’s origins trace back to his high school years, where he operated a wood and metal workshop to bootstrap initial prototypes.
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The Huntington Beach, California-based startup is aiming to revolutionize both defense hardware and the way it’s made. According to TechCrunch, rather than relying on traditional centralized weapons factories, Mach is building “Forge 1,” a 115,000-square-foot facility in Southern California designed to manufacture its most advanced products.
Forge 1 represents the first step in Mach’s broader vision to establish a network of decentralized micro-factories across the U.S. and internationally, each designed to manage the full production process from raw materials to final assembly, TechCrunch reports.
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This distributed approach is part of Thornton’s vision to build a resilient national defense infrastructure, capable of withstanding geopolitical shocks and supply chain disruptions. “Instead of very centralized factories, we will build many, many smaller factories to actually have a survival defense industrial base,” he told TechCrunch. The factories will be designed to take raw materials through final assembly.
According to a company statement on March 18, Mach entered into a partnership with Heven Drones, which will use Forge 1 to assemble and scale unmanned aerial systems.
Mach’s product lineup includes Viper, a jet-powered vertical takeoff and landing unmanned aerial vehicle that doesn’t require a runway and is up to 300 times cheaper to build than traditional drones. It also builds Glide, a weapon launched from near-space altitudes to increase strike range and reduce the chance of interception. The company claims it could potentially hit any target on Earth without being detected, TechCrunch reports.
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