Rising-star defense tech Mach Industries has announced a new $100 million round of funding at a $470 million valuation. TechCrunch first reported that this deal was in the works last month.
New investor Keith Rabois from Khosla Ventures joins existing investor Geoff Lewis of Bedrock Capital to lead the round. Existing investor Sequoia also participated. The fresh funding brings the startup’s total raised to about $185 million to date.
The round represents a modest step up from the company’s previous valuation. When Mach announced its Series A funding in October 2023, investors assigned the company a $335 million post-money valuation. This means the latest round’s $470 million post-money to pre-money valuation is essentially flat, representing just $35 million in additional value over the past year and a half.
Mach Industries’ rise in the defense tech world has been nothing short of meteoric, even if its latest funding round suggests investor enthusiasm is cautious. It was founded in 2023 by then 19-year-old CEO Ethan Thornton, who dropped out of MIT to work full time on the company.
In June 2023, he landed Sequoia’s Stephanie Zhan and Shaun Maguire as investors who led Mach’s $5.7 million seed round. Geoff Lewis, founder of Bedrock Capital, led Mach’s $79 million Series A a few months later.
Within the last year, Mach has grown from about 20 employees to 140, Thornton tells TechCrunch. The startup has designed three weapons systems: a super light jet-powered vertical takeoff and landing unmanned aerial vehicle called Viper that requires no runway; a high-altitude glider plane that can strike targets from miles away at the edge of the atmosphere, named Glide; and Stratos an in-air satellite with sensors and communication capabilities that can operate at extreme altitudes.
The company has also secured significant contracts and infrastructure investments. Earlier this year, Mach was selected by the Army Applications Laboratory to develop a vertical takeoff precision cruise missile and announced plans for its first factory — a 115,000-square foot facility in Huntington Beach, California.
Mach’s goal is to create weapons with “the ability to carry out strikes at very long ranges,” Thornton said. But the fast-growth of his young company has been an whirlwind experience. He remembers moving into the company’s first office in Cambridge, Mass., just two years ago, when the company was so pinched for cash that he and founding team member Ashton Bennett hand-built the office furniture, college-dorm style.
“Like, we went to Home Depot, bought a bunch of plywood, bought a bunch of 2x4s, and built all the furniture ourselves,” he told TechCrunch via video conference from a room that now features commercial office furniture. “I’d say we’re still equally scrappy, but now it’s very, very exciting to have a full factory and a team [that’s] equal parts industry veterans who’ve done this before” and those new to the defense industry.
The founder also says he’s aware of the gravity of building weapons during a time of unprecedented advances in AI and global political unrest. He points to Ukraine’s drone “Spider Web” attack on Russian bombers as an example of the new kind of pinpointed, AI-powered warfare that has already arrived.
Thornton believes that his company, along with other young defense tech contenders, are building weapons for this new reality more affordably than traditional defense contractor offerings.
He emphasizes that his work is done in conjunction with layers of national defense decision makers. “The work we do is done in direct contact with the State Department, with the Department of Defense, with Congressional members,” he says.
Moving forward, Mach will use the new funding to build out manufacturing capabilities and develop several new products in R&D that Thornton won’t publicly discuss yet, including some kind of new propulsion engine.
