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How a hydrogen explosion led a teenage founder to become Sequoia’s first defense tech investment
As Sequoia Capital’s first defense tech investment, Mach Industries is making waves with its impressive fundraising efforts. The startup has raised over $80 million since its founding in 2023 and shows no signs of slowing down. But the path that brought it to this point was anything but smooth.
Mach Industries’ founder, Ethan Thornton, began his journey as a teenage MIT student before dropping out to focus full-time on his startup. However, just months before landing a seed investment from Sequoia in the summer of 2023, Mach had a major setback: a hydrogen gun prototype exploded, sending hundreds of pieces of shrapnel flying and injuring a team member.
Speaking with TechCrunch at StrictlyVC in San Francisco last week, Thornton addressed the incident publicly for the first time, attributing it to a lack of safety resources. “At the time, we were trying to self-fund it, and we didn’t have the money to run these procedures the way they should have been,” he said.
Following the explosion, Mach Industries essentially shut down all work until it raised funds from Sequoia Capital, Thornton revealed. Today, with those resources secured, Thornton asserts that the startup now has a full safety team and is working with the US military to develop new weapons. The company has also shifted its focus away from hydrogen, which Thornton believes was “probably a bad tech bet” that required further development.
Despite this setback, Mach Industries has pivoted and is building different kinds of weapons altogether, such as a new cruise missile and a bomb called “Glide” that can be fired from the edge of space. The company also recently landed a US Army contract and announced plans for a network of decentralized factories it calls “Forge.”
According to Thornton, building numerous prototypes is key to the company’s success. He claims that VCs have poured $85 million into Mach Industries because of this ability. “It’s not necessarily my ability to build these things, but more so our ability to actually work with the federal government to get programs of record built around them,” he remarked.
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Source: https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/09/how-a-hydrogen-explosion-led-a-teenage-founder-to-become-sequoias-first-defense-tech-investment/
