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 Thornton said. It sounds like an expensive postcode in an arms factory, but Southern California is in the shadow of SpaceX and has become a hot spot for America’s fast-growing 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 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 undecided sites in the US, he hopes to have an international location.
The Huntington Factory is already building both a slid vertical takeoff and landing, landing the company’s main product, a weapon called the Glide, and an unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) called the Vipers. The 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 vehicle located at 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.
Teen Founder, $85 million in 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, Bedlock Capital founder Jeffreys led Mach’s $79 million Series A.
Although many of the founders of the defensive technology industry are young (Palmer Lucky was in his mid-20s when he founded Andrill), the company’s impulse 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.
Note: This story has been updated to describe one of the company’s products at the request of the company.