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Defense tech startup Mach Industries has raised a fresh $600 million in capital in a Series C extension round that has doubled its valuation to $3.7 billion, the company announced on Thursday. It announced the original Series C in June, which was $300 million at a $1.8 billion valuation. Investors in both tranches include Ribbit Capital, Infinite Capital, Bedrock Capital, and Sequoia. That means that this raise represents a two-fold jump in just three months. The previous round was also a big increase: quadruple the valuation of a $100 million round at a $470 million valuation, announced in June 2025. Mach manufactures a variety of unmanned military vehicles and weapons, including vertical takeoff and landing drones, systems intended for long-range strikes, and counter-drone systems. It operates a 115,000-square-foot manufacturing facility at its headquarters in Huntington Beach, California, with additional facilities located across the state. Its pitch is that it builds highly integrated systems that cost less than those from incumbent defense contractors. To that end, it acquired solid rocket motor (SRM) startup Exquadrum in a $50 million cash-and-equity deal in May, beating out at least eight other potential buyers, the startup said. The rise of drones has created a shortage of SRMs in a market largely controlled by two incumbents. Exquadrum was Mach’s answer to that bottleneck. The acquisition has since become the basis for a new line of business for the company called Mach Energetics, which produces SRMs and energetic systems for others. A unit called Mach Propulsion is also working on jet engine manufacturing in the hopes of addressing a similar bottleneck for those types of engines. Mach, founded and run by 22-year-old Ethan Thornton, is a quintessential example of the kind of defense tech startup that classic Silicon Valley VCs are spending big on. Thornton dropped out of MIT at age 19 to work on Mach and soon landed Sequoia’s Stephanie Zhan and Shaun Maguire as investors, marking the first defense tech investment for the venerable venture firm. After landing a U.S. Army contract earlier this year, the company also caught the attention of Ribbit Capital, once best known as a fintech investor but more recently involved in a string of high-profile AI deals, ranging from coding startups like Cognition to neoclouds like Crusoe.
document fetched 2026-09-10 22:21 · canonical https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/10/defense-tech-mach-industries-doubles-valuation-to-3-7b-in-3-months