How a hydrogen explosion led a teenage founder to become Sequoia’s first defense tech investment

As the first defense technology investment in Sikoia Capital, Mac Industries is an art dear, Overdue Its founder, Ethan Thorton, now 21, before it was founded in 2023 In his startup the full -time focus is excluded.

However, a few months before the seeds of seeds in Sikoya in the summer of 2021, Mc had a big push: a hydrogen gun prototype it exploded, a few hundred pieces of pieces of pieces pieces to pieces pieces of pieces. ReportThe

Talking to TechCrunch During his presence in San Francisco in Strikelivis On April 7, Thorton publicly addressed the incident for the first time, saying that it happened in the absence of a security agency.

“At that time, we were trying to give it self-hell, and we didn’t have the money to pick up the way these methods should have been,” he said.

After the explosion, Mac Industries Sikoya was “basically stopped all work” until the fund was raised from Capital, Thortan said. Now, with the protection of these resources, Thorton says that Mac has a full security team and is working to develop new weapons with the US military.

The startup has also moved away from the initial focus on hydrogen, a gas that is famously unstable. Speaking at Strikelivis, Thorton said that hydrogen was “probably a bad technology bet” which require further development. However, Pivot could not match the match.

Now, Mach is perfectly making different types of weapons, such as a new cruise missile and a bomb called “glide” that can be dismissed from the edge of the space. It Recently landed on the US Army Agreement and announced the plan It is called “Forge” for a network of decentralized factory.

According to Thorton, “Creating lots of prototypes” is the main part of why $ 85 million is poured in the VCS company.

He commented, “My ability to create these issues is not necessarily, but even more so our skills to work with the federal government to get record programs around them,” he commented.