Mach Industries, the three-year-old defense tech startup founded by 22-year-old Ethan Thornton, raised a $300 million Series C at a $1.8 billion valuation—nearly quadrupling its worth in a year after a June 2025 deal valued it at $470 million.
Mach Industries didn’t wait for permission to move fast.
On Monday, the three-year-old defense tech startup announced a $300 million Series C at a $1.8 billion valuation—an eye-popping leap from June 2025, when Mach raised $100 million at a $470 million valuation. The company’s valuation is now almost four times higher in a single year.
The round is led by deep tech fund Infinite Capital and Ribbit Capital, known for fintech and, lately, for showing up in hot deals across the tech map—from AI coding startups like Cognition to neoclouds like Crusoe. Other investors include Bedrock Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Khosla Ventures.
Mach’s CEO and founder Ethan Thornton is only 22. He said the urgency didn’t come from ambition alone. but from the economics of building autonomous weapons—an industry he described as capital-intensive. Thornton said he started fundraising “a couple of months ago” and found the market eager enough that the process accelerated.
“We went out to raise 200 [million dollars] and we were extremely oversubscribed at 200 and happy with the price, so we decided to push up to 300. We’re still oversubscribed at the 300 mark,” Thornton said.
That oversubscription matters, because Mach’s momentum is showing up in hardware—not just slides. Founded in 2023. the Huntington Beach. California-based company says it now has five autonomous vehicles in development: Viper. a jet-powered vertical takeoff vehicle; Glide. a high-altitude glider capable of launching weapons; Stratos. an airborne surveillance platform; Dart. a low-cost counter-drone interceptor; and Pike. intended for launching long-range munitions.
Mach expects production to begin next year on at least three of these systems.
And this week, Thornton said Mach also won a U.S. Department of Defense contract to create a new, sixth vehicle the startup had not discussed publicly. The contract, from the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), is aimed at developing the Navy’s “runway-independent strike aircraft,” as Mach describes it.
Thornton said the platform is for a “very large aircraft” and could have applications in the commercial industry as well.
The scale is growing in parallel with the product lineup. Mach says it has expanded from about a dozen employees in its first year to about 350 today. It also runs a 115. 000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Huntington Beach. along with design and production facilities in a number of other locations.
“So by the end of this year, in 2026, we will have brought on four new production facilities,” Thornton said.
Investors weren’t just buying the company’s future vehicles. Thornton said another reason the checks got big: Mach has been securing key inputs fast in a market that can’t keep up.
Last month. Mach orchestrated an acquisition of solid rocket motor (SRM) startup Exquadrum in a $50 million cash-and-equity deal. beating out more than eight other potential buyers. the startup said. Thornton said the move was about control and speed in a market with a shortage of SRMs. He pointed to a supply bottleneck where drone demand has surged. but production capacity is controlled by two major prime defense contractors: Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman. Lead times for purchasing can stretch for years.
With Exquadrum, Mach says it can manage its own rocket motor destiny and launch a new commercial business, Mach Energetics, to sell the engines. Thornton declined to share revenue, but he said the current mix is 50/50 between selling to the government and selling to other companies.
For Thornton, the rapid climb has been emotionally real. He described looking around at an all-hands meeting when the company was tiny—“like 12 people” two years ago—and then contrasting it with a two-year party where there were “like 200 plus chairs” and people were standing.
He said his biggest source of pride isn’t just growth, but speed: the kind of product development timeline that startup teams chase because defense customers and battlefield realities don’t wait.
“Traditionally, it’s four years to build a jet engine. That’s about the fastest you can find in this space. And we went from no team to building a team to a jet engine firing in about eight months,” Thornton said.
Behind the valuation jump is a clear belief driving Mach’s fundraising: that faster, more affordable products can reach the military—and then spill over into commercial use—without the long, bespoke cycles associated with legacy prime defense contractors.
Mach Industries defense tech autonomous weapons Series C Infinite Capital Ribbit Capital Bedrock Capital Sequoia Capital Khosla Ventures Ethan Thornton DIU runway-independent strike aircraft Exquadrum solid rocket motors Mach Energetics Huntington Beach