As Sequoia Capital’s first protection tech funding, Mach Industries is an trade darling, elevating over $80 million since its founding in 2023. Its founder, Ethan Thornton, now 21, started Mach as a teenage MIT scholar earlier than dropping out to focus full-time on his startup.
However just a few months earlier than touchdown a seed funding from Sequoia in the summertime of 2023, Mach had a serious setback: a hydrogen gun prototype it was constructing exploded, sending lots of of items of shrapnel flying and injuring a staff member, Forbes first reported.
Chatting with TechCrunch throughout his look at StrictlyVC in San Francisco on April 3, Thornton addressed the incident publicly for the primary time, saying it occurred resulting from a scarcity of security assets.
“On the time, we have been attempting to self-fund it, and we didn’t have the cash to form of run these procedures the best way they need to have been,” he stated.
After the explosion, Mach Industries “primarily shut down all work” till it raised funds from Sequoia Capital, Thornton stated. Now, with these assets secured, Thornton says Mach has a full security staff and is working with the U.S. army to develop new weapons.
The startup has additionally pivoted away from its preliminary deal with hydrogen, a gasoline that’s famously unstable. Talking at StrictlyVC, Thornton stated hydrogen was “in all probability a foul tech guess” that required additional growth. However the pivot hasn’t fazed Mach — removed from it.
Now, Mach is constructing totally different sorts of weapons altogether, corresponding to a brand new cruise missile and a bomb known as “Glide” that may be fired from the sting of area. It additionally lately landed a U.S. Military contract and introduced plans for a community of decentralized factories it calls “Forge.”
“Constructing a whole lot of prototypes” is a key a part of why VCs have poured $85 million into the corporate, in accordance with Thornton.
“It’s not essentially my potential to construct this stuff, however extra so our potential to truly work with the federal authorities to get packages of report constructed round them,” he remarked.