Investor interest in defense startups has grown, with nearly $8 billion of VC dollars flowing to aerospace and defense startups last year, and 19-year-old MIT dropout Ethan Thornton’s Mach Industries has landed Sequoia Capital’s first investment into defense tech:
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.
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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.
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Before his first academic year at MIT even commenced, he started working with MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a national R&D center managed by the school for the DOD. The military has long had an interest in hydrogen, especially as a robust energy supply chain for contested war environments, and the lab had its own group focused on energy systems.
While Thornton realized that the Lincoln Lab wasn’t the perfect fit for what he wanted to build, he was able to build his government connections. And then he decided to drop out.
“This was pre-team, pre-revenue, anything,” he said. “I just couldn’t sit through classes anymore.”
Thornton also walked away from Lincoln Lab with two significant hires: Erik Limpaecher, who was a senior technical staff at the lab’s energy systems group, and who had been with the center for nearly 12 years; and Mark Donahue, a former program manager for control and autonomous systems, who departed the lab after 15 years. Limpaecher is now Mach’s chief innovation officer, while Donahue was installed as VP of engineering.
Thornton did end up finishing his first year at MIT this past spring, but not before putting together a team of undergrads and testing a large, mounted gun under the railroad tracks near Charles River, and joining the newest class of Peter Thiel’s Thiel Fellowship in February.
The advanced version replaces the potato projectile, I assume.
Sounds like a Theranos for the DoD.
“Thornton hopes to be manufacturing thousands of products a year within the next five years, with certain systems in the hands of the end user within 12 months – though some, he said, will take more like 12 years.”
The boy is getting with the program! No need to hurry. China will wait to attack until we are ready — and our investors have been well-paid.
This does seem like a smart guy taking advantage of VC investors with money to waste. Use a more difficult, less effective fuel like hydrogen, and convert from a highly-targeted system to a dumb low-accuracy bullet — but it will be ready in 12 years. Promise!
Use of fuel-air mixtures to fire projectiles has long been postulated as an obvious step forewards in mechanized warfare, much as full flow staged combustion engines had long been postulated as an obvious step forewards in rocket science (eg, methane turbopumped with a little bit of oxidizer, and oxidizer turbopumped with a little bit of methane, which is copacetic since as the simplest hydrogenated carbon methane produces no complex breakdown products [soot] that would not participate in the reaction); and yet for half a century hence noone ever actually managed to implement a design until Elon Musk came along decided that’s what he was going to do.
Of course it would recommend itself for a whole host of logistical issues – not just in supply, but in the design of vehicles and weapon systems themselves – yet normality bias is like a force of nature, and so often radical departures like this simply don’t happen on a systemic level unless or until a man with kingly sentiments drags his vassals along and simply makes it happens.
“This does seem like a smart guy taking advantage of VC investors with money to waste.”
Yes. And it’s worse for him if he is honest, as he’ll discover.
Resumes that take the form of ‘I dropped out of MIT to launch my own startup’ are something of a badge of honor in the techbro crowd.
Which is of course as it should be. The incumbent whig priesthood has never liked it though; wonders of techne need to come from their conclaves of bishops (peer review) or else it can’t come from anywhere at all; and every time it does puts the Story of Progress that they tell about themselves to justify themselves to lie; so they’ve always rode herd over every nascent upswelling of techpriests, even if their lives depend on it (like their upcoming defeat in Malorussia).
Sand Hill Road is the right arm of the establishment. Such cockslobbering is so embarrassing.
This is like those stories of the newly minted commissioned officer given his first command.