As Sequoia Capital’s first protection tech funding, Mach Industries is an business 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.
But 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 a whole lot of items of shrapnel flying and injuring a crew member, Forbes first reported.
Speaking to TechCrunch throughout his look at StrictlyVC in San Francisco on April 3, Thornton addressed the incident publicly for the primary time, saying it occurred because of an absence of security assets.
“At the time, we have been making an attempt to self-fund it, and we didn’t have the cash to kind of run these procedures the way in which they need to have been,” he stated.
After the explosion, Mach Industries “basically 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 crew and is working with the US army to develop new weapons.
The startup has additionally pivoted away from its preliminary give attention to hydrogen, a fuel that’s famously risky. Speaking at StrictlyVC, Thornton stated hydrogen was “in all probability a nasty tech wager” that required additional improvement. But the pivot hasn’t fazed Mach–removed from it.
Now, Mach is constructing totally different sorts of weapons altogether, comparable to a brand new cruise missile and a bomb referred to as “Glide” that may be fired from the sting of area. It additionally lately landed a U.S. Army contract and introduced plans for a community of decentralized factories it calls “Forge.”
“Building a number of prototypes” is a key a part of why VCs have poured $85 million into the corporate, based on Thornton.
“It’s not essentially my capacity to construct this stuff, however extra so our capacity to truly work with the federal authorities to get applications of report constructed round them,” he remarked.
