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Sequoia - backed Mach Industries , the defense tech establish by 21 - year - onetime Ethan Thornton , landed a contract bridge with the U.S. Army and has plans for its first factory , Thornton told TechCrunch .
The factory will be 115,000 straightforward feet in Huntington Beach , California , where Mach ’s headquarters is located , CEO Thornton said . While that sounds like an expensive zip code for a weapons factory , Southern California — in the shadow of SpaceX — has become a hot spot for America ’s burgeoning defense technical school industry .
Mach is also annunciate it was select by theArmy Applications Laboratoryto develop a vertical put-on preciseness cruise missile it calls “ Strategic Strike . ” This was a developmental contract that was awarded in the third quarter of 2024 .
Thornton evidence TechCrunch he and the U.S. Army are harbinger this contract now because the technology successfully met its initial flight test last month .
As for the factory , that ’s another area where defence tech company like Mach , as well as Anduril , are trying to innovate . Mach ’s manufacturing plant , which it call Forge 1 , will be one of many “ decentralised ” factories the company plan to work up .
“ rather of very centralized factories , we will build many , many pocket-sized factories to actually have a survival defense industrial radix , ” he explained . The factory will be designed to take raw materials through concluding assemblage .
In summation to other as - yet - to - be - square up website in the U.S. , he hop to have international locations .
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The Huntington factory is already building both of the company ’s main products , a weapon call Glide and a first-rate - short jet - powered vertical takeoff and landing unmanned aeriform fomite ( UAV ) anticipate Viper . Viper is hump for its completely vertical takeoffs , requiring no rail , and Mach says it is up to 300 times less expensive to construct than traditional UAVs .
“ Viper is manufacturable in that decentralized sort of web of manufacturing plant , and that ’s a huge business deal . You do n’t involve specialty tooling to make it , which mean that if the U.S. has to ramp up production , we wo n’t rely on these centralized locations , ” he said .
Glide is a bomb deploy from a fomite lay at the edge of space . This is supposed to give Glide more range ( Mach claims it will have countless range to strike down on targets anywhere on Earth ) and also make it more hard to shoot down .
Thornton say this first factory should one day be able to give rise 1,000 Vipers and 3,000 sailplaning a month .
Teen founder, $85 million in funding
Mach Industries is a buzzy defense tech startup because it was Sequoia ’s first defense force tech investment and also because Thornton was a teen when he establish the company .
He shed out of MIT to influence on Mach when he was just 19 and soon set ashore Sequoia ’s Stephanie Zhan and Shaun Maguire as investor . They moderate Mach ’s $ 5.7 million source roundannouncedin June 2023 . A few month later , in October 2023 , Geoff Lewis , beginner ofBedrock Capital , led Mach ’s $ 79 million Series A.
While many of the defense tech industry ’s founders are unseasoned ( Palmer Luckey was in his mid-20s when he founded Anduril ) , the drift for this caller came when Thornton was still in in high spirits school .
“ Back in high school , I black market a wood and metal workshop to actually bootstrap the company and take off making initial products . And then probably the mellow risk of exposure matter I did , I deteriorate out of MIT — before we had chapiter , or before I had a team , ” he allege .
Mach has since become one of the “ it ” companies in refutation tech . For instance , it ’s one of the handful of troupe thatfamed former Palantir recruiter Peterson Conwayworks with . It now utilise dozens .
Note : This story updated the description of one of the party ’s products by request of the company .
