Ethan Thornton dropped out of MIT at 19 to build weapons. His first attempt - a hydrogen-powered system assembled with parts from Home Depot and Amazon - didn't work, because, as he put it, "hydrogen was just a bad bet in general." Three years later, his company Mach Industries is running six weapons programs and just closed a $300 million Series C round at a $1.8 billion valuation, bringing total funding to roughly $485 million.

Thornton, who grew up in Boerne, Texas (population: 25,000), became "really, really concerned" about China's rise in his early teens and concluded that unmanned systems would redefine warfare - and that the U.S. was moving too slowly. So he's now trying to do everything at once: a vertical-takeoff strike aircraft, a long-range anti-ship missile, two stratospheric systems, a cheap surface-to-air interceptor for drones, and a 40-foot Navy logistics-and-strike aircraft that flies over a thousand miles with a thousand-pound payload. That last one is a big leap for a company whose biggest aircraft to date was 13 feet long.

None of the six is in full-rate production yet, but Thornton says Mach has won about 13 government contracts, mostly in the middle stage of defense procurement. He aims to push three of the six into rate manufacturing by year's end - going from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of units per month at a factory Mach plans to stand up soon. "The hard part is actually getting the stuff into the building," he said, referring to jet engines, solid rocket motors, and radar. Mach built and fired two jet engines from scratch in eight months (a process that traditionally takes four years) and acquired solid rocket motor company Exquadrum for $50 million. Selling components now accounts for about half of Mach's revenue.

Mach's approach differs from peers like Shield AI, which spent years as a one-product company, and Saronic, which builds only autonomous surface vessels. Both have been rewarded: Shield AI raised $2 billion at a $12.7 billion valuation; Saronic raised $1.75 billion at $9.25 billion. The company Mach more closely resembles is Anduril - which raised $5 billion in May at a $61 billion valuation and landed a $20 billion Army contract. Thornton insists the field isn't zero-sum, noting that China builds roughly a thousand cruise missiles a day while the U.S. builds 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.

When asked about Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey never acknowledging Mach publicly, Thornton shrugged it off, saying they're "on the same team" fighting for Western sovereignty. His investors - Sequoia, Khosla Ventures, and Ribbit Capital - presumably don't care. Thornton says the hardest part of running Mach changes every six months: engineering first, then sales, now manufacturing. He protects four to five hours a day to think and "war game the future," sometimes pulling colleagues into it - which, he admits, "can kind of frustrate them sometimes." The best feedback comes from employees in companywide forums where they ask him the most aggressive questions possible. "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.