Watch out, world: The LA boys are teaming up.
Yesterday, Mach Industries and new-age manufacturing giant Divergent announced that they’ve teamed up to build a drone called Venom, a “prototype flight demonstration aircraft showing hardware development at software speed,” according to a statement put out by the two companies.
And they’re not messing around when they say “software speed.” The small plane-like drone went from concept to flight in just 71 days, the partners said (and there’s a cool video to prove it).
So, in the length of a situationship, people out there designed, built, and flew a drone. Cool, cool, cool.
Arsenal of Freedom: In case you weren’t following Pete Hegseth’s whirlwind El Segundo tour, Divergent has been having a bit of a moment lately.
The manufacturing startup was founded by father-son duo Kevin and Lukas Czinger back in 2014 and set out to, basically, bring the way we build advanced stuff into the 21st century.
The company’s secret sauce is its Divergent Adaptive Production System (DAPS), a digital manufacturing platform that combines AI, 3D printing, and automated assembly.
- Divergent’s in-house, AI-enabled engineering and design software optimizes structures for performance and manufacturability.
- After design, DAPS uses industrial-scale metal 3D printing to produce structural components using application-specific alloys (think metals specifically designed to withstand force and heat).
- Then, the company’s robotic manufacturing system can assemble everything from missile systems to Group 4 and 5 drone airframes, USVs, and even super high-end sports cars (Google their automotive company, Czinger).
- Once everything is printed and assembled, they sell the end product back to the customer.
And to say they’ve been a hit would be an understatement. Their growing list of customers includes Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and General Atomics—plus Bugatti, Aston Martin, and McLaren on the automotive side.
Investors have gotten a taste for their 3D-printed alloys, too. Back in September, Divergent raised a $290M Series E at a $2.3B, bringing total funding raised to nearly a billion.
No hands: If Divergent has made a name for building super high-end stuff speedy quick, Mach has made quite the splash in the drone game.
The company—founded by wunderkind and MIT dropout Ethan Thornton in 2023 when he was just 19—has raised over $240M from investors including Bedrock, DCVC, and Sequoia Capital. Last summer, Thornton and his team scored a sweet, sweet $100M Series B led by Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures.
Mach makes a few different drones:
- Viper: An unmanned jet-powered VTOL
- Glide: A high-altitude glider with a strike system capable of long-range, low-signature delivery
- Stratos: A persistent high-altitude “in-air satellite” platform for ISR and communications
They’ve also got a massive, 115,000-square-foot factory they call “Forge” in Huntington Beach, California, which the company basically frames as an advanced manufacturing WeWork. The idea is they can build their own drones, but can help you build yours, too.
Fittingly, Mach provided all of the drone brains for this partnership with Divergent. According to a statement by the two companies, the company “established the baseline requirements and architecture leveraging the avionics and simulation from existing, flight-proven tech stacks with a modular, open-systems architecture to accelerate development from concept to flight.”
Divergent then “executed the digital design and 3D print of the Venom structure, including wings, fuselage, skins, and control surfaces as monolithic assemblies rather than conventional multi-part builds.”
Superspeed: While a spokesperson for Divergent declined to comment on specific specs for Venom or which programs it would be a fit for, the two companies seemed to frame the whole thing as a proof of concept for the kind of speedy, quick development and manufacturing that Mach and Divergent champion.
“This is the value-add of Divergent materialized. Given a customer’s requirements, Divergent can design, build, and test hardware without drawn-out development timelines…Divergent can move as fast as the customer is willing to go,” the spokesperson told Tectonic.
“Mach was willing to move fast to innovate,” they added. “Their start-up mentality enabled Divergent engineers to stress test design cycles rapidly…In working with Mach, both companies were strategically aligned to not just deliver a nice set of drawings, but test real hardware as quickly as possible.”
According to the spokesperson, the project was fully funded by Divergent.