Meet the 19-year-old MIT drop-out 'replacing gunpowder' for the defense industry

TECH CRUNCH

Silicon Valley loves its wunderkinds, but the same cannot be said of Washington, D.C., where the central mandate is not to take risks, but to de-risk.

Or that’s how it’s been until recently. The two American power centers have been solidifying a détente, spurred by the war in Ukraine and the great global competition with China. Investor interest in defense startups has grown, with nearly $8 billion of VC dollars flowing to aerospace and defense startups last year – up from just $1.4 billion in 2018, according to the analytics firm PitchBook.

Concurrently, Pentagon leaders have acknowledged that getting startup tech to the warfighter is a national security imperative, which has led to greater willingness to work with companies outside the small suite of aerospace primes.

Few stories embody this incredible shift more than one that emerged in the middle of June: that of Mach Industries, and its nineteen-year-old founder Ethan Thornton. The company has captured interest from VCs and the DoD, landing Sequoia Capital’s first investment into defense tech and courting interest from the Pentagon. Mach’s seed round, which included participation from Marque VC and Champion Hill Ventures, came to $5.7 million.

Mach is developing hydrogen-powered platforms for the military, including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), munitions, and hydrogen generation systems. The company is betting that techniques like hydrogen combustion, powered by an energy source that can be manufactured in the field, will give the military an advantage in case conflicts with near-peer adversaries arise.

Speaking generally in a recent interview with TechCrunch, Thornton described a solution that’s less expensive, and perhaps less exquisite, than the ultra-costly weapons programs of today. It’s a mindset shift embodied in hardware: instead of thinking in terms of missiles, think in terms of something more like bullets. On LinkedIn Thornton has said that the company is “working to replace gunpowder,” and in our interview he described a less expensive approach to munitions.

“Taking a missile [and turning it into] a bullet, every time you do that, you really, really decrease your costs,” he said. “That’s fundamentally one of the changes Mach wants to see happen: taking more away from the rocket equation – because you have to bring your own propellant, your own sensors, and things get very expensive – and back to actually an older model using more projectile-based systems.”

Thornton’s interest in hardware stretches back to his childhood; the way he tells it, it’s part-nature, part-nurture, with a grandfather who built kit aircraft in his spare time, a high school job as an auto mechanic, and a small business selling handmade kitchen knives, cutting boards and other products.

At some point along the way, he developed what he called an “[obsession] with electrolysis.” Electrolysis is a process by which water is split into its constituent elements – one of which, of course, is hydrogen. The first result of that obsession was a small arms device he made while still in high school. The entire thing cost around $200 – funded by his parents, after he pitched them with a 20-page paper – and consisted of a couple of deer feeder batteries and an electrolyzer, all powering what was essentially a bazooka.