Ethan Thornton is trying to do everything all at once

Ethan Thornton dropped out of MIT at 19 to build weapons. The first one, a hydrogen-powered system he prototyped with parts from Home Depot and Amazon, didn t work out — hydrogen was just a bad bet in general, he told me this past week at Tech Crunch s Strictly VC event in Los Angeles. Three years later, his company, Mach Industries, is running six weapons programs and earlier this month closed a $300 million Series C round at a $1.8 billion valuation. The startup has now raised roughly $485 million altogether.

Thornton grew up in Burnet, Texas, a town with roughly 6,500 residents, in a family with deep military ties. Around 2017 or 2018 — when he was still in his early teens — he started becoming, by his own account, really, really concerned about the rise of China and what he saw as an impending great-power conflict. That concern eventually sharpened into a conviction that unmanned systems were about to redefine warfare, and that the U.S. was moving too slowly to meet the moment.

What that looks like in practice, midway through 2026, is those six simultaneous weapons programs and a company that has a lot to prove instead of focusing on one thing, getting that right, and then expanding. Thornton is aware that Mach s diffuse focus creates some lingering questions for outsiders. It s very hard, he volunteered Thursday night. But he doesn t think defense rewards the kind of single-minded focus that rocket launch, say, demands. It is a chess game you re playing with an adversary, he said, with hundreds of different products that need to be shipped if we want security. Pick just one, he suggested, and you ve already lost the game.