Ethan Thornton’s vision for Mach Industries convinced blue-chip investors Sequoia and Bedrock, but he struggled to implement it. Technical challenges, security risks and an smug leadership style hampered him.
From David JeansForbes Employee
AtNineteen-year-old Ethan Thornton had a grand vision for a brand new company: he desired to end the U.S. military’s centuries-long dependence on gunpowder ammunition by developing a line of hydrogen-powered weapons. He called the corporate Mach Industries, and after graduating from MIT, he began researching and developing artillery that may very well be powered by hydrogen generators on the front lines. He claimed this could give the military a decisive advantage on the battlefield.
Investors flocked to the seemingly up-and-coming defense technology company led by a visionary teenage dropout. Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire co-led a $5 million seed funding round last summer – the primary check the enterprise capital firm wrote to a defense company. Three months later, Bedrock managing partner Geoff Lewis led a $79 million Series A investment, valuing the young startup at greater than $300 million.
But Mach’s staggering funding was preceded by a disturbing and nearly fatal misstep. Months earlier, Thornton and one other worker had been nearly killed while testing a Mach weapon. Four former employees with knowledge of the matter said Forbes that Thornton reached right into a blasting chamber surrounding a hydrogen-powered weapon when the gas ignited unexpectedly, blowing up the machinery and sending a hail of shrapnel through the room. Thornton was miraculously unharmed, but a colleague who was helping with the test was taken to hospital with a whole bunch of pieces of metal embedded in his body. (The worker recovered, but a few of the shrapnel stays.)
Mach is a component of a brand new crop of defense technology firms led by young, patriotic entrepreneurs who wish to construct firms that serve America’s national security interests. They are driving a defense technology boom fueled by VC funding; between According to Pitchbook, $100 billion in enterprise capital flowed into the sector between 2018 and 2023. But here, the Silicon Valley ethos of “move fast and break things” appears to be an unwise approach to weapons-building. Interviews with nine current and former Mach employees reveal a chaotic early-stage company that did not deliver on the vision investors expected, exacerbated by questions of safety and a childish approach to leadership.
Beyond hydrogen-powered firearms, which like pneumatic potato cannonsMach had pitched Prometheus, a mobile hydrogen generator that may very well be used on the battlefield, to investors. But based on three former employees, the device was scrapped when Mach couldn’t find an economical method to provide the aluminum fuel needed for hydrogen production.
“I realized: wow, this is not what I wanted to be a part of.”
“The most disturbing thing about the whole thing, frankly, was the financial aspect,” said Eric McManus, a former program manager and U.S. Navy veteran who left Mach last yr. “To get that much money that quickly, without a real product, without flight testing, without a demo? Nothing.”
The tests that did happen didn’t go well. During a jet engine test last yr, based on interviews with several people present, Thornton tried to carry a drone at full throttle together with his hands to stabilize it for takeoff. Senior executives were dismayed; amongst many other risks, the drone could have tipped over and essentially become a projectile, endangering everyone on the test site, three former employees said. ForbesThe shooting range management said it had aborted the test.
Meanwhile, Mach staff needed to contend with Thorton’s smug leadership style and childish humorousness. At one point, a television within the essential lobby of the Austin headquarters showed a timer reading “Time to invade Taiwan,” which, based on a photograph taken by Forbesestimated that a Chinese attack would occur in 1,800 days – the time Mach should be able to deploy his product. “I was in the Taiwan Strait when there was unrest in 2008, and he was probably still in middle school,” McManus said. “I found that very insulting.”
On one other occasion, during a team meeting, Thorton compared Mach’s hierarchy to that of a cult: leaders, clergy, priests, community leaders, true believers. On a photograph of a white board was written the phrase “What is a cult?”, with an outline of its various characteristics, equivalent to “Communal living: all interactions with each other. Birth, life, death. Eating, breathing, sleeping” and “Hive mind: true love for members.” Staff were confused by the analogy. “I realized, wow, that’s not what I wanted to be a part of,” one said.
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Thornton declined to reply quite a lot of detailed questions, but released an in depth Blog Post on the corporate’s website addressing a few of the issues Forbes “We are building an incredibly difficult company, and like most startups, the likelihood of failure is high,” he wrote. “As a one-year-old company, we have made many mistakes, but it is part of our culture that we work to fix them, learn from them, and relentlessly improve.”
Bedrock and Sequoia didn’t reply to requests for comment.
Thornton built his team across the shared goal of supporting America’s military interests. He said that began when he was a baby helping his grandfather on a West Texas farm. “15 months ago, I was working out of a college dorm room,” he wrote within the blog post. “Today, I’m writing this from our 115,000-square-foot factory, where I work with people I deeply admire to create world-changing products for war-fighting customers.” He said the corporate has used 15% of the cash raised and currently employs 45 people.
Thornton, who was appointed to the 2024 Forbes 30 Under 30 and Thiel Fellow last yr, said before He borrowed $200 from his parents in highschool to construct a straightforward gas gun using “deer feed batteries and an electrolyzer.” After a transient stint as a mechanic in highschool, he attended MIT, where, he told TechCrunch, he assembled a team of scholars and tested a “large, mounted gun under the railroad tracks near the Charles River.”
While at MIT, he convinced a team of hydrogen experts led by Erik Limpaecher from the college’s military lab, Lincoln Labs, to go away their posts to work on his vision to interchange gunpowder, and founded the corporate as Trident Industries in late 2022. After renaming itself Mach, the corporate began developing half a dozen products named after Greek gods, including a drone called Medusa and a reconnaissance balloon called Hades, based on a pitch deck shared by Retrieved 2018-08-18.
But three months after Bedrock reportedly led Mach’s Series A funding round in October 2023, Limpaecher announced on LinkedIn that he was leaving Mach to begin a brand new company. “I bring with me an existing team, technology, prototype products, customer relationships and revenue” – effectively ending the corporate’s hydrogen ambitions. Responding to Limpaecher’s post, Thornton said, “Earlier this year, we decided to spin off that team from Mach. While they were performing at an incredible level, we felt it was best to focus on our core product line.” In an interview, Limpaecher said he was “glad that Ethan supported our plans.”
In January, the corporate focused on a drone called Viper, a move that puts it consistent with many other firms vying to sell drones to the U.S. military. The company expects to generate about $850,000 in sales from the product this yr, based on internal documents released ForbesHowever, it has since been redesigned as a cruise missile that can “do the job at less than 25 percent of the cost” of current products, Thornton wrote within the blog post last week.
Thornton has since moved the corporate’s headquarters to Huntington Beach, California, near the El Segundo neighborhood, which is attracting attention from investors like Andreessen Horowitz and has an enormous pool of hardware talent. He also appears to be gaining traction on the Pentagon; he was recently invited to talk on an Army Application Lab panel. And this week he announced that he had “successfully completed a full flight at a military test site” for one more, as-yet-unnamed product the corporate is developing.
“When I went to college, I wanted to help national security. I was, and still am, incredibly concerned about America’s ability to fight a major war,” Thornton wrote on his blog last week, adding, “I received far more support from investors and recruits than I expected.”
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