Ethan Thornton is trying to do everything all at once

Mach’s approach differs sharply from some of its peers. Shield AI, founded in 2015, spent years as essentially a one-product company around its V-BAT drone before unveiling a second platform, the autonomous X-BAT fighter, last October — and even that is being positioned as one large, deliberate bet, not a portfolio. Saronic, founded in 2022, builds only autonomous surface vessels, scaling one unified autonomy stack across hull sizes from six feet to 180 feet.

Both have been rewarded for that discipline: Shield AI raised $2 billion this year at a $12.7 billion valuation; Saronic raised $1.75 billion at $9.25 billion.

The company Mach’s strategy more closely resembles is Anduril — which is bigger, older, and the one company against which every other defense-tech startup gets measured, fairly or not. Thornton draws the comparison himself, though he argues there’s a meaningful difference between the two companies. “Anduril’s playbook has been very much top-down, starting with the software stack,” he said. “We’re very much bottom-up, starting from the hardware stack and then starting to wrap software around it.”

It’s a distinction, yes, but Mach is still inevitably operating in Anduril’s shadow. Anduril raised $5 billion in May at a $61 billion valuation — more than 30 times Mach’s — and in March it landed a 10-year, $20 billion-ceiling Army enterprise contract consolidating over 120 separate procurement actions. Whatever Mach is building toward, Anduril got there years and tens of billions of dollars earlier.

Thornton insists the field isn’t zero-sum. He points to the scale of the problem: China reportedly builds something like a thousand cruise missiles a day; the U.S. builds roughly one every three days. “X company and Y company and Z company could all go build these things and it still wouldn’t be enough production,” he said. He also argues the Pentagon structurally won’t allow a monopoly — that it deliberately keeps two or three vendors alive in each category rather than picking one winner.

Whether or not that’s a generous reading of the competitive landscape, I put it to him that Anduril’s most famous co-founder, Palmer Luckey, has never, as far as I can tell, acknowledged Mach publicly. Thornton shrugs off any suggestion that Anduril isn’t interested in making room for Mach, telling me he respects Luckey, and that they’re “on the same team,” fighting for the same goal of Western sovereignty.

No doubt his investors, including Sequoia, Khosla Ventures, and Ribbit Capital, couldn’t care less. Strip away the founder-prodigy framing — the Texas workshop, the MIT dropout story every profile leads with, including this one — and what’s left is a genuinely interesting experiment led by a founder who seems, at least, to know what he doesn’t know.

Thornton has been candid that the hardest part of running Mach changes every six months: engineering first, then sales, and now manufacturing at scale, which he expects to dominate the next year. He says he tries to protect four or five hours a day to think and “war game the future,” sometimes pulling colleagues off their work to do it with him — which, he admits, “can kind of frustrate them sometimes.”

On the question of who pushes back on him — who keeps a fast-rising founder honest — Thornton said the most valuable feedback doesn’t come from investors or even his executive team, who can end up in the same echo chamber as the CEO. It comes, he said, from the people actually doing the work.

He described routine company-wide forums, his COO’s idea, where employees get microphones and ask him anything. It started with Thornton quietly recruiting a few trusted colleagues to ask aggressive questions. It’s since evolved into something harder to control — and, he suggested, more useful for it. “I basically stand up there for like an hour,” he said, “and get asked the most aggressive possible questions by people in the company.” He seems to relish it.

For more, you can watch our sit-down with Thornton below.