Mach Industries just spent $50M to solve a major defense tech problem
Mach Industries just spent $50M to solve a major defense tech problem
Mach Industries 斥资 5000 万美元，旨在解决国防科技领域的重大难题
Three-year-old Mach Industries has acquired solid rocket motor startup Exquadrum in a $50 million cash-and-equity deal, the Huntington Beach-based defense startup tells TechCrunch. Exquadrum — now rebranded as Mach Energetics — has been fully folded into Mach’s operations, giving it direct control over one of the most important, and constrained, components in modern unmanned systems. 总部位于亨廷顿海滩的国防初创公司 Mach Industries 向 TechCrunch 透露，该公司已斥资 5000 万美元（现金加股权）收购了固体火箭发动机初创公司 Exquadrum。Exquadrum 现已更名为 Mach Energetics，并已完全并入 Mach 的运营体系，使其能够直接掌控现代无人系统中至关重要且供应受限的组件之一。
The deal itself started with a lucky break. The two companies first connected last September when an Exquadrum customer at an MIT recruiting event happened to overhear a Mach recruiter mention that the company was in the market for a solid rocket motor supplier. Introductions were made, Mach came in as a customer, and now, roughly five months later, it has acquired the company outright, beating out upwards of eight other potential buyers in the process, it says. 这笔交易始于一次机缘巧合。去年 9 月，在麻省理工学院（MIT）的一场招聘会上，Exquadrum 的一位客户偶然听到 Mach 的招聘人员提到公司正在寻找固体火箭发动机供应商，两家公司因此结缘。随后双方建立了联系，Mach 最初以客户身份介入，而仅仅五个月后，Mach 便成功全资收购了该公司，并据称击败了其他八家以上的潜在买家。
“The Exquadrum acquisition marks an important next stage in Mach’s growth,” said founder and CEO Ethan Thornton, who dropped out of MIT at 19 to start the company. “As we deliver vehicles to the warfighter, we’ll continue to vertically integrate our supply chain across solid rocket motors, engines, radar, and avionics to ensure we deliver the best possible product at the lowest cost. In many areas of the defense industrial base, these components are not only too expensive or lacking performance, they’re simply unavailable, with lead times stretching years. In short, vertical integration is non-optional.” “收购 Exquadrum 标志着 Mach 发展进入了重要的下一阶段，”创始人兼首席执行官 Ethan Thornton 表示。他在 19 岁时从麻省理工学院退学并创立了该公司。“在向作战人员交付载具的同时，我们将继续在固体火箭发动机、引擎、雷达和航空电子设备领域进行供应链垂直整合，以确保以最低成本交付最优产品。在国防工业基础的许多领域，这些组件不仅价格昂贵或性能不足，甚至根本无法获得，交付周期长达数年。简而言之，垂直整合是必不可少的。”
That supply problem is real and getting more acute. Decades of consolidation have left the domestic solid rocket motor market effectively controlled by two large primes — Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman — with little independent capacity to absorb the growing demand that modern drone warfare has created. Indeed, in February, the Pentagon awarded the defense tech outfit Anduril $43.7 million specifically to expand domestic SRM production (its second such investment in the company in just over a year), explicitly calling SRMs a critical bottleneck in the munitions supply chain. 这种供应问题是真实存在的，且正变得愈发严峻。数十年的行业整合导致国内固体火箭发动机市场实际上被 Aerojet Rocketdyne 和诺斯罗普·格鲁曼（Northrop Grumman）这两大巨头所垄断，几乎没有独立的产能来消化现代无人机战争所带来的日益增长的需求。事实上，五角大楼在 2 月份向国防科技公司 Anduril 拨款 4370 万美元，专门用于扩大国内固体火箭发动机（SRM）的生产（这是其一年多来对该公司的第二次此类投资），并明确指出 SRM 是弹药供应链中的关键瓶颈。
Mach is now explicitly positioning itself as part of the solution, and not just for its own programs but for the broader ecosystem. Mach Energetics plans to sell components, testing services, and subsystems to other defense firms, a maneuver that suggests Mach sees itself as potential infrastructure for the defense tech industry and not just a systems builder. Mach 现在明确将自己定位为解决方案的一部分，不仅是为了其自身的项目，也是为了更广泛的生态系统。Mach Energetics 计划向其他国防公司出售组件、测试服务和子系统，这一举措表明 Mach 不仅仅将自己视为系统构建者，更将其视为国防科技行业的潜在基础设施。
According to Mach, all 85 Exquadrum employees are coming over as part of the deal, along with the company’s IP, business lines, and its 70,000-square-foot facility in Victorville, California, which is anchored by a nearby energetics and rocket propulsion test site. The combined company now has roughly 350 employees. Exquadrum co-founders Kevin Mahaffy and Eric Schmidt (no relation to the former Google CEO) are both taking on leadership roles within Mach Energetics and the broader organization. 据 Mach 称，Exquadrum 的全部 85 名员工都将随交易加入公司，同时加入的还有该公司的知识产权、业务线以及位于加利福尼亚州维克多维尔（Victorville）的 7 万平方英尺设施，该设施依托于附近的一个高能材料和火箭推进测试场。合并后的公司目前拥有约 350 名员工。Exquadrum 的联合创始人 Kevin Mahaffy 和 Eric Schmidt（与前谷歌 CEO 无关）都将在 Mach Energetics 及整个组织中担任领导职务。
The acquisition also mirrors moves by other ambitious defense tech startups that are focused on owning the stack and using cost and speed as competitive weapons. Mach has five vehicle programs in various stages of development — Viper, a jet-powered VTOL; Glide, a high-altitude strike glider; Stratos, an airborne surveillance platform; Dart, its low-cost counter-drone interceptor; and Pike, a long-range strike munition built for large-scale deployment — with plans to enter production on at least three of them this year. 此次收购也反映了其他雄心勃勃的国防科技初创公司的策略，即专注于掌控整个技术栈，并将成本和速度作为竞争武器。Mach 目前有五个处于不同开发阶段的载具项目：喷气动力垂直起降机 Viper、高空打击滑翔机 Glide、机载监视平台 Stratos、低成本反无人机拦截器 Dart，以及专为大规模部署而设计的远程打击弹药 Pike。公司计划在今年内至少让其中三个项目进入生产阶段。
The company says the acquisition meaningfully improves unit economics across all of them at exactly the moment it is starting to scale. Mach has raised nearly $200 million in total — most recently a $100 million Series B last June led by Bedrock Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Sequoia Capital — at a valuation of $470 million. It’s a multiple that right now looks modest for a company with such a trajectory and will definitely be worth watching as the rubber starts to meet the road this year. 该公司表示，此次收购恰逢其开始扩大规模之际，显著改善了所有项目的单位经济效益。Mach 总共筹集了近 2 亿美元资金——最近一次是去年 6 月由 Bedrock Capital、Khosla Ventures 和红杉资本（Sequoia Capital）领投的 1 亿美元 B 轮融资，估值为 4.7 亿美元。对于一家拥有如此发展轨迹的公司来说，这个估值倍数目前看起来还比较保守，随着今年业务进入实战阶段，其表现绝对值得关注。