Ethan Thornton

TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry’s 2026 profile states that he grew up in Boerne, a town of about 25,000 people in TexasTexasTexas is a U.S. state in the south-central United States, with its capital at Austin and its largest city Houston. It was admitted to the Union on December 29, 1845, as the 28th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 29,145,505 residents.Open the full entry, and that his family has deep military ties; Fortune’s 2026 article likewise states that he grew up in a military family in Texas.⁠[1][2]

Other sources give different accounts: a June 2024 Orange County Business Journal article states that he grew up in West Texas and then went to Cambridge, MassachusettsMassachusettsMassachusetts (officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States; its capital and largest city is Boston. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on February 6, 1788, the sixth state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 7,029,917.Open the full entry, and on to Austin; the episode page of The Shawn RyanShawn RyanShawn Ryan is a podcast host, former U.S. Navy SEAL and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) security contractor, and founder of the training company Vigilance Elite, who hosts the long-form interview program The Shawn Ryan Show. The show began with interviews of special operations veterans, later expanded to guests such as politicians and to current affairs, and ranked among Spotify’s top ten U.S. podcasts of 2024.Open the full entry Show states that he is originally from Texas and grew up on a farm; and the list of fellows that the Thiel Foundation published in 2023 gives his hometown as Boston.⁠[3][4][5]

ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry’s 2024 article states that, by his account, his commitment to helping the military began when he helped his grandfather on a farm in West Texas; the leadership page of Mach Industries’ website states that his passion for manufacturing began in his youth, helping on his grandparents’ farm, and that his early experiences solving tough challenges through hands-on work gave him a lifelong respect for the industry and led him to realize that hardware solutions could fill critical gaps in the U.S.United StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry defense ecosystem. TechCrunch wrote in 2023 that his grandfather built kit aircraft in his spare time.⁠[6][7][8]

TechCrunch writes that around 2017 or 2018, in his early teens, he became “really, really concerned” about China’s rise and a possible great-power conflict, a concern that grew into the belief that unmanned systems would redefine warfare and that the United States was moving too slowly. Fortune writes that his interest in defense began before he was old enough to drive.⁠[1][2]

TechCrunch wrote in 2023 that he worked as an auto mechanic in high school and ran a small business selling handmade kitchen knives, cutting boards and other products. The Mach Industries website states that he funded early prototypes for defense-related technologies with savings from his work as an auto technician; the episode page of The Shawn Ryan Show states that he began prototyping weapons in high school, funded through car tech jobs, knife and furniture sales and small engineering projects; and Inside Unmanned Systems states that he founded Mach Industries with funds saved from a manufacturing business he started in high school. In March 2025 he recalled in TechCrunch: “Back in high school, I ran a wood and metal workshop to actually bootstrap the company.”⁠[8][7][4][9][10]

TechCrunch writes that he developed an obsession with electrolysis and that its first result, made while he was still in high school, was a small arms device: a couple of deer feeder batteries and an electrolyzer powering what was essentially a bazooka, costing around $200 and paid for by his parents after he pitched them with a 20-page paper; Forbes likewise writes that in high school he borrowed $200 from his parents to build a basic gas gun with “deer feeder batteries and an electrolyzer.”⁠[8][6]

Sequoia CapitalSequoia CapitalSequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972, investing from the seed stage through the growth stage. Its historical investments include Apple, Cisco, Google, YouTube, Airbnb, and Stripe; in 2021 it introduced the Sequoia Capital Fund structure, which can continue to hold public securities, and in 2023 its regional businesses became independent brands and partnerships.Open the full entry wrote in 2023 that he had worked with hardware for much of his early life and by age 16 was already prototyping defense applications in his garage; Fortune writes that by 16 he was building such prototypes on his parents’ property.⁠[11][2]

As a senior at Champion High School he was named a 2022 National Merit Scholarship finalist, with plans to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after graduation; he also signed a national letter of intent to play football at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.⁠[12][13]

At MIT he studied aerospace engineering. Before his first academic year began, he started working with MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a Department of DefenseU.S. Department of DefenseThe U.S. Department of Defense is an executive department of the United States federal government, formed in 1949 from the National Military Establishment created in 1947 and headquartered at the Pentagon. The department’s website describes it as America’s oldest and largest government agency.Open the full entry-focused research and development center managed by MIT that had an energy systems group. TechCrunch writes that he found it was not a perfect fit but built government connections there; Sequoia Capital wrote that he kept prototyping while at MIT and that his work drew the interest of Lincoln Laboratory.⁠[3][8][11]

Fortune writes that he studied aerospace at MIT, where he also made the football roster.⁠[2]

At MIT he assembled a team of undergraduates and tested a large, mounted gun under the railroad tracks near the Charles River.⁠[8][6]

The Orange County Business Journal stated in June 2024 that a predecessor of Mach Industries was incorporated in September 2022, while the paper’s April 2024 article states that the company had largely operated in stealth mode since its founding a little more than three years earlier. Forbes states that the company was founded at the end of 2022 as Trident Industries and later renamed Mach. Mach Industries’ own press release and website give 2023 as the year of its founding.⁠[3][14][6][15][7]

Forbes writes that he persuaded a team of hydrogen experts from MIT Lincoln Laboratory, led by Erik Limpaecher, to join him; TechCrunch wrote in July 2023 that Erik Limpaecher, a senior technical staff member with nearly 12 years at Lincoln Laboratory, had become Mach’s chief innovation officer and that Mark Donahue, a former program manager with 15 years at the laboratory, had become vice president of engineering. A pitch deck seen by Forbes shows that the company’s early products were named after Greek gods, including the Medusa drone and the Hades reconnaissance balloon.⁠[6][8]

Sources differ on when he left MIT: TechCrunch wrote in July 2023 that he finished his first year at MIT in the spring of 2023 and then decided to drop out; Fortune writes that he received a Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry before finishing his first year and left MIT to work on his company full-time; the Orange County Business Journal states that he dropped out after his first semester; and the episode page of The Shawn Ryan Show states that he left MIT after one semester in 2023 to focus on building Mach full-time.⁠[8][2][3][4]

In 2023 he said that he “just couldn’t sit through classes anymore,” and that “I don’t like doing anything halfway,” calling leaving school a clear decision that he did not regret. In 2025 he described dropping out as “probably the highest risk thing I did,” since it came “before we had capital, or before I had a team.”⁠[8][10]

Forbes wrote in 2024 that four former employees with knowledge of the matter said that during a test he was reaching into a blast chamber surrounding a hydrogen-powered gun when the gas unexpectedly ignited; the explosion destroyed machinery and sent shrapnel across the room. He was unharmed, while a colleague helping with the test was rushed to hospital with hundreds of pieces of metal in his body; the colleague recovered, though some shrapnel remains. Forbes writes that months before the company’s financing, he and the employee were almost killed while testing a Mach weapon.⁠[6]

TechCrunch wrote in 2025 that the accident, which injured a team member, happened a few months before Sequoia Capital’s seed investment in the summer of 2023 and that Forbes first disclosed it; he attributed it to a lack of safety resources, saying “we didn’t have the money to sort of run these procedures the way they should have been,” and said that the company “essentially shut down all work” until Sequoia Capital’s funding arrived. The article states that the company has since built a full safety team.⁠[16]

On February 8, 2023, the Thiel Foundation announced its next class of 20 Thiel Fellows, listing him third; the announcement describes his project as Mach Industries pioneering a suite of defense systems using new inventions in the hydrogen space. The announcement states that the Thiel Fellowship encourages talented young people with big ideas to start companies instead of attending college, and that during the two-year program fellows receive $100,000 and mentorship from the Thiel Foundation’s network of founders, investors and scientists, the only requirement being that they pause college enrollment.⁠[5]

The Thiel Fellowship was founded by Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry in 2011. TechCrunch wrote in July 2023 that he had joined the newest class of Peter Thiel’s Thiel Fellowship in February; Forbes, the Orange County Business Journal and Fortune also state that he is a Thiel Fellow.⁠[17][8][6][18][2]

On June 15, 2023, Sequoia Capital partners Stephanie ZhanStephanie ZhanStephanie Zhan is an early-stage investing partner at Sequoia Capital who focuses on artificial intelligence, developer tools, and related technology companies. She graduated from Stanford University in computer science, joined Sequoia in 2015, took part in early investments in companies including Linear, Middesk, Rec Room, and Tavus, and serves on the boards of companies including Linear, Reflection, Ricursive Intelligence, and Skild.Open the full entry and Shaun MaguireShaun MaguireShaun Maguire is a venture capitalist and a partner on Sequoia Capital’s seed/early team; he earned a PhD at Caltech and previously co-founded the cybersecurity company Qadium (later renamed Expanse) and served as a partner at GV.Open the full entry announced that the firm was leading Mach Industries’ seed round, calling it Sequoia’s first investment in a hardware defense technology company. The article describes Mach as taking “a hardware-first approach to defense” with new hydrogen creation and combustion techniques, building a suite of oxyhydrogen defense platforms including unmanned aerial vehicles and aerial protection devices, with the aim of solving hypersonic defense; it states that hydrogen can be manufactured in the field, is interchangeable across Mach’s systems, and improves projectile range and power as well as aerial loiter time and speed.⁠[11]

The seed round was $5.7 million, with participation from Marque VC and Champion Hill Ventures; TechCrunch wrote in 2025 that it was announced in June 2023 and led by Sequoia Capital’s Stephanie Zhan and Shaun Maguire, and the Orange County Business Journal also states that Sequoia Capital led it, while Forbes describes it as a $5 million seed round co-led by Shaun Maguire. He was 19 at the time. Fortune writes that Stephanie Zhan, the Sequoia Capital partner who led the investment, said, “Ethan is a force of nature.”⁠[8][10][14][6][2]

In July 2023 Mach Industries was developing hydrogen-powered unmanned aerial vehicles, munitions and hydrogen generation systems, betting that combustion of hydrogen produced in the field would give the U.S. military an edge against near-peer adversaries. On LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry he wrote that the company was “working to replace gunpowder”; he wanted munitions to be more like bullets than missiles, saying that “every time you do that, you really, really decrease your costs.”⁠[8]

At the time the company had about 15 full-time employees, with its headquarters in Austin and offices in Boston; Boston handled engineering, while Texas was where hydrogen was tested in kinetic and combustion applications. The seed funding was to go to engineering, manufacturing, research and development and hiring; he hoped that within five years Mach would make thousands of products a year, with some systems reaching end users within 12 months.⁠[8]

In October 2023 Geoff Lewis, the founder of Bedrock Capital, led Mach Industries’ $79 million Series A. Forbes writes that the round valued the company at more than $300 million, and the Orange County Business Journal gave $335 million in 2024; the same paper’s 2025 OC50 profile describes the Series A as an $84.1 million round led by Bedrock Capital and Sequoia Capital, with valuations at the time cited as between $251 million and $335 million.⁠[10][6][14][18]

He was named to the Manufacturing & Industry category of the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2024 as the founder of Mach Industries; the MIT Alumni Association’s roundup of the 35 people with MIT ties on the list notes that he dropped out of MIT.⁠[6][19]

About three months after the Series A, Erik Limpaecher announced on LinkedIn that he was leaving to start a new company, taking the team, technology, prototypes, customer relationships and revenue with him. Thornton said, “Early this year we decided to spin this team off of Mach,” and Limpaecher said that he was glad Ethan supported their plans.⁠[6]

Forbes writes that the company had pitched Prometheus, a mobile hydrogen generator for the battlefield, which three former employees said was scrapped because Mach could not find a cost-effective way to produce the aluminum fuel it needed; in January 2024 the company pivoted to a drone called Viper, for which internal documents projected $850,000 in revenue that year, and Viper was later redesigned as a cruise missile that he said would cost less than 25% of current products.⁠[6]

In April 2024 Mach Industries moved its base to Orange County, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry, leasing an entire new industrial building of about 110,000 square feet in Huntington Beach and planning to hire about a dozen local engineering and manufacturing workers; real estate sources cited the building at 5473 Bolsa Ave. in the Huntington Gateway development, on land once used by BoeingBoeingBoeing is an American company that provides commercial airplanes, defense and space systems, and aviation services, and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.Open the full entry, as the new base. The company’s LinkedIn page listed Huntington Beach as its headquarters and his own LinkedIn profile cited Huntington Beach (Surf City) as his base, and job postings indicated that drone flight testing would take place mainly in the Mojave Desert.⁠[14]

In a note on the company website dated May 18, 2024, he wrote that after closing the Series A in October 2023 the company moved to Huntington Beach to be closer to top technical talent and to scale better; he said that Orange County was more costly but “incredibly beneficial” for access to talent, that the company still operated in Texas, and that “We’ll look to mass manufacture somewhere near Texas most likely.”⁠[3]

In May 2024 Forbes published an investigation by David Jeans titled “Investors gave a teenager $85 million to build hydrogen weapons. It’s not going well.” Forbes interviewed nine current and former Mach employees and compared Mach’s hydrogen-powered firearms to “pneumatic potato cannons.”⁠[6]

Eric McManus, a former program manager and U.S. Navy veteran who left the company in 2023, criticized Mach for raising so much money so soon without any real product, a flight test or a demonstration. Three former employees said that during a jet propulsion test in 2023 he tried to hold a drone down with his hands at full throttle to steady it for launch, that the drone could have tipped over and become a projectile, endangering everyone on the test range, and that range administrators shut the test down.⁠[6]

The article states that a television in the main foyer of the Austin headquarters displayed a timer called “Time until Taiwan Invasion,” which a photo showed at about 1,800 days, and that McManus, who said he had been in the Taiwan Strait during civil unrest in 2008, found the timer “very offensive.” At a team meeting he compared Mach’s hierarchy to that of a cult (leader, clergy, priests, community leaders, true believers); a photo of a whiteboard showed the words “What Is A Cult?”, and employees were perplexed by the analogy.⁠[6]

He declined to answer Forbes’s detailed questions and instead published a blog post addressing some of the issues, writing that he wanted to help national security and was concerned about America’s ability to fight a major war, and that “Between investors and recruits, I received far more traction than I expected”; he also wrote that 15 months earlier he had been working from a dorm room and now worked from a 115,000-square-foot factory, that the company had used 15% of the money it had raised, and that it had 45 employees. Bedrock Capital and Sequoia Capital did not respond to requests for comment.⁠[6]

In an interview with the Orange County Business Journal in June 2024 he said that the Forbes article did not fairly portray the company’s work; in a note on the company website he described Mach as a one-year-old business that had “made many mistakes” and was working to fix them and learn from them.⁠[3]

In June 2024, at 20, he and about 50 colleagues were working in a new 115,000-square-foot industrial building in Huntington Beach; after its $79 million Series A and $5.7 million seed round the company was valued at $335 million and was focused on two products, Viper, a drone-like miniature fighter, and a high-altitude weapons platform. He said hydrogen was “a fuel for some of the stuff we do,” including balloons; the company expected to reach about 100 employees by the end of the year and had no new funding round planned, and he called Mach “a manufacturing company more than anything else.”⁠[3]

He said the path ahead would be “very hard” but that he had time to succeed; he said he faced no discrimination over his age from investors or customers — “The customer just cares about the technology” — and that building a team that could scale from “50 people to 5,000 people” in a couple of years was a challenge. He said he respected Palmer LuckeyPalmer LuckeyPalmer Luckey (born September 19, 1992) is an American inventor and entrepreneur. He founded Oculus VR and developed an Oculus Rift headset prototype in 2012; Facebook acquired the company in 2014. In 2017 he cofounded defense technology company Anduril Industries. He subsequently established retro-gaming hardware company ModRetro and helped found Erebor, a bank serving the technology industry.Open the full entry, the founder of Anduril IndustriesAnduril IndustriesAnduril Industries is a defense technology company headquartered in Costa Mesa, California, United States, co-founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey and several former Palantir and Oculus employees. It develops autonomous drones, unmanned undersea vehicles, border surveillance towers, counter-drone systems, and the Lattice command-and-control software, and builds its own large-scale weapons manufacturing facilities. As of May 2026, the company was valued at $61 billion.Open the full entry, that they were “very different people,” and that the two had never met.⁠[3]

An article that August states that as of August 5 Mach was seeking to fill 20 new positions, including composites engineer, quality engineer, aerospace structures engineer and drone engineer.⁠[20]

On March 4, 2025, Mach Industries announced that the U.S. Army’s Army Applications Laboratory had selected it to develop Strategic Strike, a vertical-takeoff cruise missile meant to give maneuver units precision strike capability; the contract was awarded in the third quarter of 2024, the design was locked by the end of September 2024, and by mid-January 2025 the missile had transitioned from vertical takeoff to full-performance wingborne flight. The release gives a range of 290 km and a warhead of more than 10 kg. He said the team had taken Strategic Strike “from design kickoff in September to flight just 14 weeks later.”⁠[21]

The same day, at 21, he described the company’s first factory, Forge 1, a 115,000-square-foot plant at its Huntington Beach headquarters and the first of many planned “decentralized” factories: “Instead of very centralized factories, we will build many, many smaller factories.” The plant was already building Viper, a light jet-powered vertical-takeoff drone that needs no runway and that Mach says costs up to 300 times less than traditional drones, and Glide, a bomb released from a vehicle at the edge of space. He said the factory could eventually produce 1,000 Vipers and 3,000 Glides a month. TechCrunch wrote the same day that Mach was one of a handful of companies that Peterson Conway, a former PalantirPalantirPalantir is a U.S. enterprise software company founded in 2003 that provides data and artificial intelligence platforms including Gotham, Foundry, Palantir Apollo, and AIP, serving government and commercial organizations. The company went public through a direct listing in 2020 and now trades on Nasdaq under the ticker PLTR.Open the full entry recruiter, works with.⁠[10]

That month Mach announced that it would build military drones with HevenDrones, a FloridaFloridaFlorida is a U.S. state occupying mainly the Florida peninsula, with its capital at Tallahassee; its most populous city is Jacksonville. It entered the Union on March 3, 1845, as the 27th state, and had a population of 21,538,187 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry company with a research and development center in Israel; the Orange County Business Journal’s OC50 profile states that production was to begin in 2025.⁠[18][22]

On March 20, 2025, Mach Industries announced Mach Propulsion, an engine division, and plans to begin building a jet engine factory later that year with a capacity of 12,000 engines a year; the division is led by Jeremy Klyde, formerly director of propulsion at Anduril Industries, who had also held leadership roles at Volvo and Lockheed MartinLockheed MartinLockheed Martin is an American aerospace and defense company whose main businesses include military aircraft, missile defense, rotary-wing aircraft and mission systems, and space systems.Open the full entry, and the German manufacturer JetCat was to supply propulsion for the Strategic Strike contract. He said that “Current micro-jet engine facilities are already operating at full capacity, even during peacetime,” and that “The United States needs to rapidly and efficiently prepare itself to produce weapons of the future at unprecedented scale.”⁠[23]

On April 3, 2025, at 21, he said at a StrictlyVCStrictlyVCStrictlyVC is a venture-capital news brand founded by Connie Loizos in 2013, combining newsletters, live interviews and podcasting. It became a TechCrunch sub-brand in 2023.Open the full entry event in San Francisco that hydrogen was “probably a bad tech bet” and that the company had moved away from it. TechCrunch writes that Mach had raised more than $80 million and was working with the U.S. military on new weapons, including a cruise missile and Glide, a bomb that can be fired from the edge of space, and planned a network of decentralized factories called Forge; he credited “Building a lot of prototypes” as a key reason venture capital firms had invested, and said that the company’s strength lay in working with the federal government to build programs of record around its products.⁠[16]

On May 26, 2025, the Orange County Business Journal named him to its OC50 list for that year, describing Mach Industries as a Huntington Beach defense startup building next-generation weapons for the U.S. military and a rival to Anduril Industries, with 119 employees, most of them in Huntington Beach and others abroad, in Texas and in Washington, D.C.; he said the goal was “to really build out a worldwide decentralized manufacturing network.”⁠[18]

On May 1, 2025, TechCrunch wrote that Mach was about to close a $100 million round co-led by the new investor Khosla VenturesKhosla VenturesKhosla Ventures (KV) is an American venture capital firm founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, and headquartered in Menlo Park, California. It made heavy early bets on clean technology, became OpenAI’s first venture capital investor in 2019, and its portfolio also includes companies such as DoorDash, Block (formerly Square), Impossible Foods, and Rocket Lab.Open the full entry, with Keith RaboisKeith RaboisKeith Rabois is an investor and entrepreneur who serves as a Managing Director at Khosla Ventures and Chairman of Opendoor. He held management roles at PayPal, LinkedIn, Slide, and Square, later worked in venture capital at Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund, and co-founded Opendoor and OpenStore. His public career spans payments, professional networking, real estate transactions, e-commerce, and venture investing, and he has expressed views on team management, delegation, and vertical integration.Open the full entry leading the deal, and the existing investor Bedrock Capital, at a valuation of about $470 million, which would bring total funding to about $185 million. On June 17 Mach Industries announced the close of a $100 million Series B led by Khosla Ventures and Bedrock Capital with participation from Sequoia Capital and existing investors, to expand its flagship factory Forge Huntington, scale Mach Propulsion and deploy its three core systems, Viper, Glide and Stratos, more widely.⁠[24][15]

In the release he said, “Mach Industries exists to enhance national readiness and preserve America’s strategic edge,” adding that global security depends on America’s ability to create asymmetric unmanned capability. Keith Rabois said Mach’s model was “purpose-built for the realities of modern conflict.”⁠[15][22]

At the time Mach’s three main systems were Viper, a jet-powered vertical-takeoff cruise missile with a range of 180 miles and a warhead of more than 22 pounds, designed to launch from beyond enemy radar range; Glide, a high-altitude glider that can strike targets from miles away; and Stratos, a large sensor and communications balloon that can stay at extreme altitudes for several months. The company was also developing “micro-jet engines” for unmanned aircraft, and its customers included the U.S. Army, the Air Force, Special Operations Command and allied governments.⁠[22]

Mach Industries introduced Dart, a counter-drone system, on January 8, 2026; on February 10 it announced that Nathan Diller had joined as president and chief strategy officer; and on February 17 it launched Venom, an autonomous strike aircraft, together with Divergent.⁠[25][26]

On February 24, 2026, the company announced a new hub in San Francisco, keeping its headquarters at Forge 1 in Huntington Beach. He said: “We expand where great engineers are solving the hardest problems.”⁠[27]

On March 9, 2026, Shawn Ryan’s podcast The Shawn Ryan Show released episode 286, titled “This 22-Year-Old Built a .50 Cal Rifle Out of Home DepotThe Home DepotThe Home Depot, Inc. is an American home improvement retailer, the world’s largest by net sales for fiscal 2025, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.Open the full entry Parts.” The episode page introduces him as the founder and CEO of Mach Industries, describing it as a defense technology company developing next-generation unmanned systems and hydrogen-powered weapons platforms; it states that his sense of urgency, intensified by the war in Ukraine, motivated him to accelerate U.S. innovation in unmanned aircraft and weapon systems to help deter China, and that he frequently speaks on the strategic significance of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, the U.S. dollar’s reserve status, social decay and “neo-feudalism,” and productive, post-partisan solutions.⁠[4]

On May 19, 2026, Mach Industries announced the acquisition of Exquadrum, a solid rocket motor company in Victorville, California, with a facility of about 70,000 square feet and customers including the U.S. Air Force, the Missile Defense Agency, DARPA and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which then began operating as Mach Energetics, Mach’s energetics division. The price was $50 million in cash and equity, and Mach said it had beaten upward of eight other potential buyers; TechCrunch writes that the solid rocket motor market is controlled by Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman, with purchase lead times that can stretch for years.⁠[28][29][30]

He said: “Bringing Exquadrum’s propulsion expertise into Mach gives us direct control over one of the most critical elements of unmanned systems performance.” A company spokesperson said that Mach inherited the subcontracting work on the Golden Dome missile defense network that Exquadrum had been delivering; earlier in May the company had received a large California tax abatement. Eric Schmidt, a co-founder of Exquadrum, described him as follows: “In a lot of ways, (Thornton) is an old soul.”⁠[28][29]

In June 2026 Mach Industries announced a $300 million Series C at a valuation of $1.8 billion, led by Infinite Capital and Ribbit CapitalRibbit CapitalRibbit Capital is a venture-capital firm founded in 2012 by Meyer “Micky” Malka and headquartered in Palo Alto, California. It began with financial-technology investing and has expanded into AI, commerce and related infrastructure. Its investments include Coinbase, Robinhood and Nubank.Open the full entry with existing investors including Bedrock Capital, Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures; the valuation had nearly quadrupled in a year. He said the company had first sought $200 million, was “extremely oversubscribed” and raised the target to $300 million, which was still oversubscribed. Micky MalkaMicky MalkaMicky Malka (Meyer Malka in securities filings) is the founder and managing partner of the venture capital firm Ribbit Capital and earlier co-founded brokerage, banking and payments companies in Venezuela, Brazil and the United States; the Forbes Midas List has included him six times since 2021.Open the full entry, the founder of Ribbit Capital, praised him and the team for building with urgency and controlling their supply chain more closely.⁠[31][30]

By then the company had grown from about 12 employees in its first year to about 350, with five autonomous vehicles in development — Viper, Glide, Stratos, Dart and Pike, a system for launching long-range munitions; the company’s release says production of at least three of them was expected to begin that year, while TechCrunch gives the following year. He expected four new production facilities by the end of 2026, declined to disclose revenue and said the business was split evenly between government and commercial customers. He recalled that two years earlier all-hands meetings had been held in a conference room with about 12 people, while the two-year party had more than 200 chairs and was standing room only; he said he was proudest of the speed of product development: “we went from no team to building a team to a jet engine firing in about eight months.”⁠[30][31]

On June 16, 2026, Mach Industries announced a Defense Innovation Unit contract for the Runway Independent Maritime Expeditionary Strike (RIMES) program, to develop an unmanned aircraft for the U.S. Navy that can carry out long-range strikes from surface combatants or expeditionary locations; Mach is the aircraft integrator and is working with Whisper Aero on Atlas, a hybrid-electric aircraft that carries a 1,000-pound payload over 1,400 nautical miles without a runway. The release states that Mach was flying five platforms, had manufactured more than 250 aircraft and had designed more than 1,000 solid rocket motors. TechCrunch’s June 21 article describes the aircraft as 40 feet long and about 4,000 pounds, taking off near-vertically and flying more than 1,000 miles.⁠[32][1]

On June 21, 2026, TechCrunch editor-in-chief Connie LoizosConnie LoizosConnie Loizos is a technology journalist, founder of StrictlyVC and TechCrunch’s general manager and editor-in-chief since 2023.Open the full entry published her interview with him at a StrictlyVC event in Los Angeles. The article states that Mach was running six weapons programs at once, had raised about $485 million in total and had won about 13 government contracts, most of them past initial design and into government range testing, though none was in full-rate production; his goal was to move three of the programs into rate manufacturing by the end of 2026. The company had built and fired two jet engines from scratch in about eight months, and selling components accounted for about half of its revenue.⁠[1]

Asked about running so many programs at once, he said, “It’s very hard,” but argued that defense is “a chess game you’re playing with an adversary” in which choosing only one product means you have already lost. He described Anduril Industries’ approach as “top-down, starting with the software stack” and Mach’s as “bottom-up, starting from the hardware stack,” and said he respected Palmer Luckey and that they were “on the same team.”⁠[1]

He said the hardest challenge changes about every six months, from engineering to sales and now manufacturing at scale; he protects four or five hours a day to think and “war game the future,” sometimes pulling colleagues in to join him, which can “kind of frustrate them sometimes.” He said the most valuable pushback comes from employees doing the work, and that at regular companywide forums, an idea of his chief operating officer, he will “basically stand up there for like an hour” taking “the most aggressive possible questions” from employees.⁠[1]

An interview published on August 10, 2026, states that at 22 he had raised $500 million for the company and that Mach ranked No. 16 on the paper’s annual list of Orange County aerospace and defense companies, with 435 employees, 400 of them in Orange County; he said the company had made about 1,000 vehicles over the previous 12 months and that “We’ll be looking to at least 10x that over the next 12 months,” and “The big push is to get on full-rate production and start deploying our stuff on the battlefield,” adding, “We expect to raise more capital in the next year.”⁠[26]

The article states that Mach was developing Atlas, a fixed-wing aircraft that takes off vertically from ships and remote locations, with Whisper Aero of Nashville, TennesseeTennesseeTennessee is a U.S. state in the southeast-central United States, with its capital at Nashville. It was admitted to the Union on June 1, 1796, as the 16th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 6,910,840 residents.Open the full entry, which he saw as possibly having airline passenger uses in the long term, and that a June report from Fort Worth, Texas, said Mach had explored a $74 million manufacturing plant there that could support up to 1,000 jobs. He said that he had no mentor for dealing with investors and that his approach had always been “just to sit down and have a conversation,” and that he wore a suit for meetings in Washington but not for investors; he also said, “If you ever make money the optimization, things tend to fall apart.”⁠[26]

On September 10, 2026, Mach Industries announced a $600 million continuation of its Series C at a valuation of $3.7 billion, doubling in about three months and bringing the Series C to $900 million, with investors including Ribbit Capital, Infinite Capital, Bedrock Capital and Sequoia Capital. The money was to fund continued development of platforms in long-range strike, counter-drone and other mission areas and the expansion of manufacturing infrastructure. He said: “Modern deterrence requires an industrial base capable of building relevant capabilities.”⁠[33][34]

A Fortune article on September 28 states that at 22 he was running a company with six weapons programs; he said private capital let Mach take risk earlier: “We’re building the product and the production capability at the same time.”⁠[2]

On October 8, 2026, Mach Industries announced that it was one of five companies to receive an Other Transaction Authority agreement for the U.S. Army’s Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) Increment 4, under which it will build on its Pike platform to develop a HIMARS-launched prototype able to engage moving maritime and relocatable land targets at ranges of more than 1,000 kilometers, with prototype development and flight testing beginning in fiscal year 2027. He said: “America needs long-range strike weapons that can be built in numbers and fielded fast,” and “We are proud to compete alongside the country’s most established weapons manufacturers.”⁠[35]

As of November 2026 the leadership page of the Mach Industries website lists him as CEO and founder and states that his ultimate goal is to create “decentralized strategic capabilities” that guarantee the defense of freedom worldwide; the website states the company’s mission as developing and manufacturing asymmetric aerospace and defense systems and components by the millions to deter war and advance prosperity, its systems including Viper, Pike, Stratos, Glide, Dart and Atlas, and its production scaled through Forge, a network of decentralized, flexible factories.⁠[7][36]

Speaking to Fortune in 2026 about young founders, he said: “You’re never going to know everything, especially when you’re starting young, and you shouldn’t expect to,” and “If you wait until you have all the answers, you’ll probably never start”; he said the key lesson he had learned was knowing whom to surround himself with — “Find people who are better than you at the things you don’t know” — and urged young founders not to be afraid to fail: “Have conviction in the problem you’re trying to solve.”⁠[2]

In a June 2026 interview he said, “I don’t think we’re going to out-manufacture China,” arguing that America’s strength lies in “creativity and productization” and that the real bottleneck is the supply chain for jet engines, solid rocket motors and radar: “The hard part is actually getting the stuff into the building.”⁠[1]

Mach Industries: Official website: https://machindustries.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[36]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[17]

X: Public account: https://x.com/ethanrthornton (opens in a new window).⁠[4]