When a kid takes a $200 loan in high school and turns it into a $470 million defense-tech juggernaut before the age most of us figured out how to make a decent cup of coffee, pay attention. Ethan Thornton didn’t just drop out of MIT. He dropped into a war room of his own making. The result? Mach Industries. And today, that Mach-speed momentum just got a $100 million Series B injection from Khosla Ventures, Bedrock Capital, and the always-watchful Sequoia Capital.
Mach isn’t your standard Pentagon poster child. They’re not reinventing the drone. They’re gutting the status quo, rebuilding it with hydrogen, and doing it through a decentralized manufacturing network built like a distributed ledger for defense. Forge 1 in Huntington Beach is just the first node, a 115,000 sq ft facility with capacity to crank out 12,000 jet engines a year. But this isn’t just about scale. It’s about resilience. No single point of failure. No traditional defense contractor bloat. Just modular, repeatable, tactical muscle at the edge.
The product lineup? Viper is a hydrogen-powered VTOL aircraft that can do the job for 1/300th the cost of legacy UAVs. Glide delivers high-altitude munitions that punch above their class. And Stratos? Think of it as a satellite that doesn’t need to leave the atmosphere to own it. Each system designed, tested, and soon-to-be deployed with the agility of a startup and the firepower of a prime.
This round will fuel more than production. It scales the Mach Propulsion division, run by Jeremy Klyde, who came out of Lockheed Martin and Anduril like he was born with a turbine in his hand. It accelerates DoD contracts like the one with U.S. Army Applications Lab for a vertical-takeoff precision cruise missile platform that’s more “game over” than “game changer.” And it doubles down on recruiting, engineering, manufacturing, and business talent that understands speed wins, and hydrogen burns clean.
Geoff Lewis from Bedrock called the shot early. Keith Rabois from Khosla added the kind of fuel you don’t find on a balance sheet. Together with Sequoia’s belief since day one, they’ve backed a company that doesn’t just want to build weapons, it wants to build an entirely new way to manufacture, deploy, and iterate them.
