How a hydrogen explosion led a teenage founder to become Sequoia’s first defense tech investment | TechCrunch

As Sequoia Capital’s first protection tech funding, Mach Industries is an trade darling, elevating over $80 million since its founding in 2023. Its founder, Ethan Thornton, now 21, started Mach as a teenage MIT scholar ahead of falling by the wayside to focal point full-time on his startup.

However a couple of months ahead of touchdown a seed funding from Sequoia in the summertime of 2023, Mach had a significant setback: a hydrogen gun prototype it was once construction exploded, sending masses of items of shrapnel flying and injuring a workforce member, Forbes first reported.

Chatting with Techmim all through his look at StrictlyVC in San Francisco on April 3, Thornton addressed the incident publicly for the primary time, pronouncing it took place because of a loss of protection assets.

“On the time, we have been looking to self-fund it, and we didn’t have the cash to type of run those procedures the way in which they will have to had been,” he mentioned.

After the explosion, Mach Industries “necessarily close down all paintings” till it raised budget from Sequoia Capital, Thornton mentioned. Now, with the ones assets secured, Thornton says Mach has a complete protection workforce and is operating with the U.S. army to increase new guns.

The startup has additionally pivoted clear of its preliminary focal point on hydrogen, a fuel that’s famously risky. Talking at StrictlyVC, Thornton mentioned hydrogen was once “most probably a nasty tech guess” that required additional construction. However the pivot hasn’t fazed Mach — some distance from it. 

Now, Mach is construction other types of guns altogether, comparable to a brand new cruise missile and a bomb referred to as “Float” that may be fired from the threshold of house. It additionally lately landed a U.S. Military contract and introduced plans for a community of decentralized factories it calls “Forge.”

“Development a large number of prototypes” is a key a part of why VCs have poured $85 million into the corporate, consistent with Thornton.

“It’s now not essentially my skill to construct this stuff, however extra so our skill to if truth be told paintings with the government to get methods of file constructed round them,” he remarked.