Exclusive: Mach Industries, founded by 21-year-old Ethan Thornton, lands U.S. Army contract, builds weapons factory

Sequoia-backed Mach Industries, the defense tech founded by 21-year-old Ethan Thornton, landed a contract with the U.S. Army and has plans for its first factory, Thornton told TechCrunch.

The factory will be 115,000 square feet in Huntington Beach, California, where Mach’s headquarters is located, CEO Thorton said. While that sounds like an expensive zip code for a weapons factory, Southern California – in the shadow of SpaceX – has become a hotspot for America’s burgeoning defense tech industry. 

Mach is also announcing it was selected by the Army Applications Laboratory to develop a vertical takeoff precision cruise missile it calls “Strategic Strike.” This was a developmental contract that was awarded in the third quarter of 2024.

Thornton tells TechCrunch he and the U.S. Army are announcing this contract now because the technology successfully met its initial flight tests last month.

As for the factory, that’s another area where defense tech companies like Mach, as well as Anduril, are trying to innovate. Mach’s factory, which it calls Forge 1, will be one of many “decentralized” factories the company plans to build. 

“Instead of very centralized factories, we will build many, many smaller factories to actually have a survival defense industrial base,” he explained. The factories will be designed to take raw materials through final assembly.

In addition to other as-yet-to-be determined sites in the U.S., he also hopes to have international locations.

The Huntington factory is already building both of the company’s main products, a weapon called Glide and a super light jet-powered vertical takeoff and landing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) called Viper. Viper is known for its completely vertical takeoffs, requiring no runway, and Mach says it is up to 300 times less expensive to build than traditional UAVs.

“Viper is manufacturable in that decentralized sort of web of factories, and that’s a huge deal. You don’t require specialty tooling to make it, which means that if the U.S. has to ramp up production, we won’t rely on these centralized locations,” he said.

Glide is a bomb deployed from a balloon-like vehicle positioned at the edge of space. This is supposed to give Glide more range (Mach claims it will have infinite range to drop on targets anywhere on Earth) and also make it more difficult to shoot down.

Thornton says this first factory should one day be able to produce 1,000 Vipers and 3,000 Glides a month. 

Teen founder, $85M in funding

Mach Industries is a buzzy defense tech startup because it was Sequoia’s first defense tech investment and also because Thornton was a teen when he founded the company.

He dropped out of MIT to work on Mach when he was just 19 and soon landed Sequoia’s Stephanie Zhan and Shaun Maguire as investors. They led Mach’s $5.7 million seed round announced in June 2023. A few months later, in October, 2023, Geoff Lewis founder of Bedrock Capital led Mach’s $79 million Series A. 

While many of the defense tech industry’s founders are young (Palmer Luckey was in his mid 20’s when he founded Anduril) the impetus for this company came when Thornton was still in high school. 

“Back in high school, I ran a wood and metal workshop to actually bootstrap the company and start making initial products. And then probably the highest risk thing I did, I dropped out of MIT – before we had capital, or before I had a team,” he said.

Mach has since become one of the “it” companies in defense tech. For instance, it’s one of the handful of companies that famed former Palantir recruiter Peterson Conway works with. It now employs dozens.