Remember that Mach Industries article in Forbes last summer? Yeah, that one. In case you missed it, wunderkind and 19-year-old MIT dropout Ethan Thornton founded a new-age defense company, raised $85M from some of the biggest investors in the game to build hydrogen-powered weapons, then shelved the project when they couldn’t figure out a cost-effective way to produce the fuel necessary for hydrogen production.
Oh, and it turns out that a few months before the raise, he had blown himself (and another employee) up. Yes, literally.
Well, looks like they took the failure to heart. On Tuesday, Mach Industries announced that they’ve doubled down on the automation game with an Army Applications Lab (AAL) contract to develop a vertical takeoff (VTO) cruise missile called Viper. The VTO was contracted by AAL in Q3 2024 under the name “Strategic Strike.”
“This is something that’s cheap enough and flexible enough to actually deploy to the edge with the warfighter,” Thornton told Tectonic.
Greek gods: Mach was founded by Thornton in 2022 as Trident Industries, with the goal of building weapons propelled by hydrogen, rather than gunpowder. The company switched its name to Mach shortly after and began developing a range of high-tech weapons, including drones, reconnaissance balloons, and hydrogen-powered missiles and guns.
- In 2023, Mach raised $85M from heavy-hitters Sequoia Capital and Bedrock Capital
- The company operates out of a 115,000-square-foot facility in Huntington Beach, CA.
- The company now employs about 110 people, according to Thornton, including alums from SpaceX and Palantir.
Thornton told Tectonic that both he and the company as a whole learned a lot from the safety incidents Forbes reported. “That…occurred before we had really raised capital. And so it really occurred because we did not have the money to hire experienced engineers and operators to make sure these things were conducted properly, and the proper equipment to run tests,” he said.
Join the swarm: The thing is, there are a lot of companies making drones. What’s so special about Viper? Thornton says that what sets Mach’s system apart is its vertical takeoff and minimal launch infrastructure.
“The big thing about Viper is the ability to have a very, very decentralized, long-range strike asset that maintains a lot of the survivability of something like a cruise missile with almost no infrastructure at launch,” he said. This makes Viper flexible and easy to deploy pretty much anywhere, according to Thornton.
- Viper has a range of 180 mi (290 km), carrying a 10+ kg (22+ pound) warhead.
- Mach kicked off design for the VTO in September and completed a successful flight test in January.
- Production of Viper is vertically integrated. That means that Mach produces all of the components themselves.
- The per-unit cost of Viper is $100-150K, depending on specifications, according to Thornton.
- According to the company, the main goal of Viper is to be able to launch from beyond enemy radar range.
Thornton doesn’t view the focus on Viper as a pivot. He told Tectonic that automation has been a core part of the company’s DNA from the beginning. “I don’t think we ever imagined a world where we were going to be sort of siloed into one thing,” he said. There was just a “much, much, much clearer path to revenue on unmanned systems,” he added.
The company is currently working to integrate AI visual and RF sensing techniques into Viper to make it operable in comms and GPS-denied environments. Thornton also told Tectonic that the company plans to begin building out a “network of decentralized, flexible factories” around the world called Forge to produce Viper and other unmanned systems.
“We aim, in the next five years, to build an ecosystem of the most capable unmanned systems on Earth,” Thornton said.