Los Angeles tech startups get big cash infusion

LOS ANGELES The weapons have not only drawn plenty of interest from the Department of Defence, but also from venture capitalists who are backing their manufacturer — Mach Industries, a Huntington Beach, California, startup founded by an MIT dropout with big ambitions

- Laurence Darmiento and Queenie Wong, Tribune News Service

Ethan Thornton, founder of Huntington Beach-based defence tech startup Mach Industries, views production at the headquarters in Huntington Beach.

(Tribune News Service)

Oneweaponbeingtested can be dropped into the stratosphere thousands of miles from its target and can deliver an explosive with precision even without GPS. Another is a cruise missile that takes off vertically without a runway so it can deliver a strike from at least 180 miles with the accuracy of a helicopter-launched rocket. The weapons have not only drawn plenty of interest from the Department of Defense, but also from venture capitalists who are backing their manufacturer — Mach Industries, a Huntington Beach, California, startup founded by an MIT dropout with big ambitions. The three-year-old company has received $185 million in venture funding and last year moved from Texas to Southern California, where it opened a factory to draw on the area's wealth of aerospace and defense talent.

"If there is a single sort of success criteria for Mach it is the ability to deter a war in the Pacific with China over the next decade, and so I think that calls for massive investment," said company founder Ethan Thornton, who is just 21. Mach’s speedy rise is remarkable, but it's just one of a number of startups in the region benefiting from a change of heart in Silicon Valley, where venture capitalists, company founders and employees have for decades resisted the lure of the defense industry — and the government contracts that come with it. That attitude has shifted markedly in just a few years as China has massively built up its military, leading to fears of a Pacific war, and the Russia-Ukraine conflict has upended conventional military thinking with its use of drone warfare.