Mach Industries quadruples to $1.8bn as the Pentagon’s drone-dominance push lifts every defence-tech valuation

This article was published on June 2, 2026 The Huntington Beach defence-tech startup, run by a 22-year-old MIT dropout, has raised a $300M Series C at a $1.8bn valuation, nearly 4x its mark from June 2025. Mach Industries, the three-year-old defence-tech startup run by 22-year-old founder and chief executive Ethan Thornton, has raised a $300m Series C at a $1.8bn valuation, nearly four times the $470m valuation it hit when Sequoia and Khosla Ventures led its $100m round in June 2025. The round was co-led by Ribbit Capital and the deep-tech-focused Infinite Capital, with Bedrock, Sequoia and Khosla following on. The funding lands inside what is now an unmistakable Pentagon push toward what defence officials are calling “drone dominance”. The Mach trajectory is itself worth pausing on. Thornton dropped out of MIT in 2023 to start Mach as a teenager; the company has grown from roughly a dozen employees in its first year to about 350 today. Its core production facility sits in Huntington Beach, California, with a 115,000-square-foot manufacturing footprint and additional design-and-production locations elsewhere. The product roadmap now spans five autonomous vehicles in development: Vi