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

This is Tech Crunch. This episode is brought to you by Framer. Listen, your wardrobe is not the only thing that should be changing with the season. Now is the perfect time to start thinking about updating and refreshing your website with new content. And Framer makes that easy to do. Even easier than trying to plan out your next outfit. Framer has everything you need to build and run a website, a canvas tool for design, hosting, a built-in CMS, and AI agents that work alongside you to help bring your vision to the screen. And it's all in one place, so you can stop skipping around to a hundred different apps. You can update your site and have it go live in a few minutes, or build a new one from scratch. Now, I love Framer's powerful SEO tools that have really helped me zero in on my target audience. I can track my traffic through their analytics, and I can optimize my site so that it works across any device. Plus, there's enterprise-grade security to protect all my info. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist, or get started building for free today at framer.com slash tcstartups for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash tcstartups for 30% off. framer.com slash tcstartups. Rules and restrictions may apply. Defense tech startup Mock 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 Ribbit Capital, Infinite Capital, Bedrock Capital, 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. Mach 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 in 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 Exquadrum in a $50 million cash and equity deal back in May. beating out at least eight other potential buyers. The rise of drones has created a shortage of solid rocket motors and a market largely controlled by two incumbents. Exquadrum 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 It's 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. Thornton dropped out of MIT at age 19 to work on Mock