Ethan Thornton tries to do everything at once

Ethan Thornton left MIT at the age of nineteen to build weapons. The first, a hydrogen-powered system he prototyped with parts from Home Depot and Amazon, didn’t work out — “hydrogen was just a bad bet overall,” he told me last week at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event In Los Angeles. Three years later, his company, Mach Industriesoperates six weapons programs and was closed earlier this month a 300 million dollars Series C round at $1.8 billion valuation. The startup has now raised nearly $485 million in total.

Thornton grew up in Burnet, Texas, a town of about 6,500, in a family with deep military ties. Around 2017 or 2018 — when he was still in his early teens — he began to become, by his own account, “really concerned” about the rise of China and what he saw as an impending great power conflict. Eventually, these fears boiled over into a conviction that unmanned systems were about to redefine warfare, and that the United States was moving too slowly to meet this moment.

What that looks like in practice, in mid-2026, is these six simultaneous weapons programs and a company that has a lot to prove rather than focusing on one thing, getting it right, and then expanding. Thornton realizes that Mach’s diffuse focus creates some lingering questions for outsiders. “It’s very difficult,” he volunteered Thursday night. But he doesn’t think defense rewards the kind of single-minded focus that firing missiles, for example, requires. “It’s a chess game you play with an opponent, with hundreds of different products that have to be shipped if we want security,” he said. I suggest you choose just one, and you will have already lost the game.

These are not simple products. Mach is developing a vertical-take-off attack aircraft, a long-range anti-ship missile, two stratospheric systems, an inexpensive surface-to-air interceptor designed to kill drones, and — announced earlier this week — a 40-foot-tall, nearly 4,000-pound Navy logistics and strike aircraft that takes off nearly vertically and flies more than a thousand miles with a thousand-pound payload.

The latter represents a real leap for a company whose largest aircraft to date is nearly 13 feet long. None of the six have been produced at full rate yet. Thornton says Mach has won about 13 government contracts, most of which are at the intermediate stage from defense procurement — past initial design, to government-scale testing — but falling short of the modified manufacturing level that fewer than 10 industry-wide programs have ever reached.

He says many of the systems should see operational deployment by the end of this year, and that his goal is to get three of the six systems up to manufacturing rate in the same window — which means going from hundreds of units a month to hundreds of thousands, at a factory that Thornton says Mach intends to have running soon.

It’s an aggressive schedule placed on top of an already aggressive bet. But Mach’s basic premise is that the United States cannot outmanufacture China, so it has to outmanufacture it—find a first-mover advantage in the way that Ukraine has against Russia, despite its superiority in production. “I don’t think we’ll overtake China in manufacturing,” Thornton said. “The thing that America continues to do well, time and time again, compared to China, is focus on innovation and production.”

Thornton says – as do other defense technology startups – that the real bottleneck is not the different platforms being built, but the supply chain that lies beneath them. “The hard part is getting things into the building: jet engines, solid rocket motors, radar,” he said. Mach built and commissioned two jet engines from scratch in about eight months, a process he says traditionally takes four years. In May, she also obtained an A The 24-year-old solid rocket motor companyExquadrum, for $50 million, beating out nearly eight other bidders by his own account. Selling components, not just vehicles, represents about half of Mach’s revenue.

Mach’s approach differs sharply from some of his peers. Shield AI, founded in 2015, spent years as a one-product company around its V-BAT drone before unveiling a second platform, the X-BAT autonomous fighter, last October — and even that is being positioned as a big, deliberate bet, not a portfolio. Saronic, founded in 2022, builds only autonomous surface vessels, scaling a single, uniform stack across hull sizes from six feet to 180 feet.

Both have been rewarded for this discipline: Shield AI raised $2 billion this year at a valuation of $12.7 billion; Saronic raised $1.75 billion on $9.25 billion.

Mach’s strategy is most similar to Anduril – it’s bigger, older, and the one company by which every other defense tech startup is measured, fairly or not. Thornton makes the comparison himself, although he says there is a big difference between the two companies. “Anduril’s playbook has been very much top-down, starting with the software stack,” he said. “We work from the bottom up, starting with the hardware stack and then starting to wrap the software around it.”

It’s a distinction, yes, but Mach still inevitably works in Anduril’s shadow. Anduril raised $5 billion in May at a $61 billion valuation — more than 30 times Mach’s value — and in March, it was awarded a 10-year Army enterprise contract with a cap of $20 billion, involving more than 120 separate procurement actions. Whatever Mach was after, Anduril got there years and tens of billions of dollars before that.

Thornton insists that the field is not zero-sum. He points out the scale of the problem: China is said to manufacture nearly a thousand cruise missiles daily; The United States builds one approximately every three days. “Company X, Company Y, Company Z could all be building these things and there wouldn’t be enough production,” he said. He also argues that structurally the Pentagon would not allow a monopoly — it is deliberately keeping two or three vendors alive in each category rather than picking a single winner.

Whether or not this is a generous reading of the competitive landscape, I explain that Palmer Luckey, Andoril’s most famous co-founder, has never acknowledged Mach publicly, as far as I can tell. Thornton ignores any suggestion that Anduril is not interested in making room for Mach, and tells Lee that he respects Loki, and that they are “on the same team,” fighting for the same goal of Western supremacy.

To be sure, his investors, including Sequoia, Khosla Ventures and Ribbit Capital, couldn’t care less. Strip away the miracle founder framework — the Texas workshop, the MIT dropout story that every profile drives, including this one — and what’s left is a really interesting experiment led by a founder who, at the very least, seems to know what he doesn’t know.

Thornton was frank that the hardest part of running Mach changes every six months: first engineering, then sales, and now large-scale manufacturing, which he expects to dominate next year. He says he tries to free up four or five hours a day to think and “play the future war,” and sometimes pulls colleagues out of their work to do it with him — which he admits “can frustrate them sometimes.”

On the question of who opposes him — who keeps the fast-rising founder honest — Thornton said the most valuable feedback doesn’t come from investors or even his executive team, which can end up in the same echo chamber as the CEO. It comes from the people who are actually doing the work, he said.

He described routine company-wide forums, his COO’s idea, where employees would get on microphones and ask him anything. It began when Thornton quietly recruited a few trusted colleagues to ask aggressive questions. It has since evolved into something that is harder to control and, it has been suggested, more beneficial. “I stand there for about an hour, getting the most aggressive questions from people in the company,” he said. He seems to be enjoying it.

For more, you can watch our session with Thornton below.