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.
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.
“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.”
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 crea …