When 22-year-old Ethan Thornton dropped out of MIT at 19, most people would call it risky. But the defense tech founder just proved the doubters wrong with his latest funding haul.
Mach Industries, the three-year-old autonomous weapons startup Thornton founded, closed a $300 million Series C round at a $1.8 billion valuation. That's a 4x jump from June 2025, when the company raised $100 million at a $470 million valuation.
The round was led by deep tech fund Infinite Capital and Ribbit Capital, with backing from Bedrock Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Khosla Ventures. Thornton says the round was oversubscribed, prompting the company to increase the target from $200 million.
"We went out to raise 200 and we were extremely oversubscribed at 200 and happy with the price, so we decided to push up to 300," Thornton told TechCrunch. "We're still oversubscribed at the 300 mark."
The Huntington Beach-based company has built five autonomous vehicles in development, from the jet-powered Viper to the low-cost Dart counter-drone interceptor. Production begins next year on at least three of them.
This week, Mach won a Department of Defense contract for a sixth vehicle that has not been publicly discussed before. It is a Navy runway-independent strike aircraft described as a "very large aircraft" with potential commercial applications.
In three years, Mach has grown from about a dozen employees to 350 today and operates a 115,000-square-foot manufacturing facility.
