Mach Industries raises $300M Series C at $1.8B valuation, ~4x in a year
What's the deal? Mach Industries, the three-year-old defence startup run by 22-year-old founder/CEO Ethan ThorntonDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, has raised a $300M Series C at a $1.8B valuation — nearly quadrupling its $470M valuation from June 2025's $100M Series B. The round was co-led by Infinite CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and Ribbit Capital, with BedrockDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Sequoia and Khosla Ventures following on. Thornton — who dropped out of MIT at 19 to start the company — went out to raise $200M and pushed to $300M after the round was oversubscribed at both marks.
What it's building. The Huntington Beach, California-based company has five autonomous platforms in development: Viper (jet-powered vertical takeoff), Glide (high-altitude weapons-launching glider), Stratos (airborne surveillance), Dart (low-cost counter-drone interceptor) and Pike (long-range munitions launcher). Production starts on at least three next year. This week Mach also won a Defense Innovation UnitDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → contract for a sixth, previously undisclosed platform — a large "runway-independent strike aircraft" for the Navy with possible commercial spinoffs. Revenue mix is roughly 50/50 government and commercial.
Why now? Last month Mach acquired solid rocket motor maker ExquadrumDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → for $50M in cash and equity, beating eight other bidders. SRMs are in acute short supply — the market is dominated by Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman with multi-year lead times — and Mach has spun the asset out as a new commercial unit, Mach Energetics. The deal lets Mach control its own propulsion and sell to the rest of the industry.
The signal. Mach has gone from ~12 employees to ~350 in three years, runs a 115,000 sq ft facility in Huntington Beach, and plans to bring four new production sites online by year-end. Series A was $79M in Oct 2023; less than three years later it's at a $1.8B post — one of the more compressed Seed→Series C arcs in defence-hardware history, in a sector where iteration in Ukraine has reset what VCs (and the Pentagon) will fund.
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