Defense tech Mach Industries doubled its valuation in 3 months; plus, Maven Robotics wants to steal your robot deployment deal

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1:13That's Framer.com slash tcstartups. Rules and restrictions may apply. Defense tech startup Mach Industries has raised a fresh$600 million in capital in a Series C extension round that has doubled its valuation to$3.7 billion. It announced the original Series C back in June, which was$300 million at a$1.8 billion valuation. Investors in both tranches include Rivet Capital, Infinite Capital, Bedrock Capital, and Sequoia. That means that this raise represents a two-fold jump in just three months. The previous round was also a big increase, quadruple the valuation of a$100 million round at a$470 million valuation that was announced in June of last year.

2:03Mach manufactures a variety of unmanned military vehicles and weapons, including vertical takeoff and landing drones, systems intended for long-range strikes, and counter-drone systems. It operates a 115 ,000-square-foot manufacturing facility at its headquarters in Huntington Beach, California, with additional facilities located across the state. Its pitch is that it builds highly integrated systems that cost less than those from incumbent defense contractors. To that end, it acquired Solid Rocket Motor startup Xquadrum in a$50 million cash and equity deal back in May, beating out at least eight other potential buyers.

2:44The rise of drones has created a shortage of solid rocket motors in a market largely controlled by two incumbents. Xquadrum was Mach's answer to that bottleneck. The acquisition has since become the basis for a new line of business for the company called Mach Energetics, which produces SRMs and energetic systems for others. A unit called Mach Propulsion is also working on jet engine manufacturing in the hopes of addressing a similar bottleneck for those types of engines. Mock, founded and run by a 22-year-old Ethan Thornton, is a quintessential example of the kind of defense tech startup that classic Silicon Valley VCs are spending big on.

3:25Thornton dropped out of MIT at age 19 to work on Mock and soon landed Sequoia's Stephanie Zahn and Sean McGuire as investors, marking the first defense tech investment for the venerable venture firm. after landing a U.S. Army contract earlier this year. The company also caught the attention of Rivet Capital, once best known as a fintech investor, but more recently involved in a string of high-profile AI deals, ranging from coding startups like Cognition to neoclouds like Crusoe.

4:00Back in 2024, Maven Robotics was brand new and they had almost nothing, except for a cartoon of a robot and a team of people. Still, they heard a large consumer goods company with logistics needs was in town to meet with four rival robot companies about automation. So, co-founder and CEO Hamza Derbas talked his way into a meeting with the company, and instead of talking about his views on robots, asked to visit their factories and warehouses. He told TechCrunch, We saw how people were working. We zeroed in on flows we could immediately bring value to. We showed them that our approach to robotics is different.

4:39We're not trying to solve a single robot problem. We're trying to autonomously take on the task end-to-end. It hooks in from one side to the warehouse management system. Product goes on trucks on the other side. Now, they won the deal, beating out companies with existing robots. After two years of work with that company and a few other partners, their boss says Maven has as many as eight robots working 16 hours a day, with 99 % or higher uptime. Yesterday, the startup emerged from stealth after raising$100 million from RoboStrategy, LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures, and XTX Markets Ventures with plans to build 250 of their third-generation robots and begin design on a fourth-generation program.

5:25Their robots sit on wheeled bases, capable of moving 10 miles an hour with two arms that can lift up to 30 kilograms. Their main job is mixed palletizing. Wooden pallets carrying boxed goods come from different factories to a distribution center, where the robot creates a new pallet containing a mix of goods to be sent to a store. Hamza said that within 48 hours of them putting the stuff on the shelves, they want to change the mix based on real-time demand. Now, here's an order with different mixed products going to that retail store. Please build it out. It's all done with human labor today. Running around the warehouse, picking one of this and one of that.

6:02At Maven's Santa Clara facility, the robot moves smoothly about its work in a training area using vacuum suckers to pick up and arrange the boxes at a reasonable speed. A live video screen shows two robots working in a customer facility while employees walk around them. Derbos spent his career in automotive engineering with a focus on EVs, but before Maven, he spent nine years working at Apple on the company's special project group, which he wouldn't discuss, but is widely thought to have been building a self-driving car before it was disbanded in 2024. That was when he started Maven with his brother Khalid, who serves as the company's CFO after a career in private equity.

6:45Like other physical AI companies, the firm relies on veterans of self-driving car efforts, which have developed the most sophisticated approaches to training autonomous hardware from real data that requires data pipelines that return information from operating robots within minutes or hours. He said, then retrain, evaluate, run ablation studies, figure out what's the right set of weights, redeploy, and then turn that loop again. In a crowded world of robot companies, Maven sets itself apart with its focus on the realities of industrial operation. Jack Pearson, an investor at RoboStrategy, who backed the company, says what sets the company apart is its background in industrial systems rather than a research culture that is optimized for learning or focused on a specific architecture.

7:34Agility. The robotics company going public this fall in a$2.5 billion SPAC deal might be the most similarly positioned firm in the market focused on safety and specific industrial workflows, but its robots stand on two legs, something Durbas, while stressing his respect for the company, says makes zero sense for anything they're doing. They are very complex, unreliable and add unnecessary costs. ROI is the name of the game here. That understanding of the realities of overheated facilities and the needs of the people who operate them has helped them get the startup out the door. But if Maven wants to expand beyond its current workflows, it will figure out some kind of research culture.

8:17While pilotization might be an$80 billion market, the next set of tasks the company is targeting will require robotic manipulation capabilities that do not yet exist. Maven's next big push is to collect more data and train its robots to be able to handle materials, and then to move toward automation and fabrication. The company will draw on its own systems, tap third-party providers, and has even developed a pair of pincer-like gloves that allow humans to emulate the form factor they want for their grippers. While the company bills itself as a maker of general-purpose robots, its strategy is to go task-by-task toward that goal.

8:59That's all for now. For the latest in startup tech news, go to TechCrunch.com.

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