Fort Worth City Council has approved up to $4.5 million in tax breaks and grants over 10 years for Mach Industries, a California-based defense tech startup weighing whether to build an unmanned aircraft manufacturing plant in the city's AllianceTexas corridor. The deal hinges on Mach hiring at least 1,000 workers, and it comes as the company juggles competing offers from sites across the state and the country.
The council's economic development agreement, first detailed by the Fort Worth Report, requires Mach Industries to make a minimum capital investment of $74 million, with $6 million earmarked for real property construction costs and the rest going toward office space and equipment. The company has also set a goal of spending 30% of its office and equipment budget with small businesses, according to the outlet's report. Mach is considering Alliance Gateway 34, a 310,036-square-foot industrial building at Westport Parkway and Independence Parkway inside Hillwood's AllianceTexas development, and expects to make its final facility-location decision in the third quarter.
Jobs, Salaries, and the Fine Print
The incentive package is structured in tiers. Mach must maintain at least 600 jobs to receive prorated incentives, and it needs 1,000 workers on payroll to unlock the full benefit, per the Fort Worth Report's account of the agreement. The company must also provide a minimum average annual salary of $67,470 to qualify for the complete incentive, and it will forfeit any incentives entirely if more than half of the plant's jobs pay less than $60,000 during the agreement term.
Fort Worth Economic Development Department official Jessica Rogers said the city's incentives and local support made it the preferred location, the outlet reported. That framing tracks with earlier reporting from Community Impact, which found that economic development negotiations between the city and Mach began in November 2025 and that Fort Worth was competing against multiple nationwide sites, with officials framing local backing as the deciding factor. Mach is one of the Fort Worth Economic Development Department's target industries, and the region's aerospace and defense cluster already counts more than 600 companies, a scale that helped Texas Governor Greg Abbott designate Fort Worth as the state's aviation and defense capital in 2025.
From MIT Dropout to $1.8 Billion Valuation
Mach Industries was founded in 2023 by Ethan Thornton, who grew up in Boerne and was 19 years old and had dropped out of MIT when he started the company. The Huntington Beach, California-based firm designs and builds aerospace and defense hardware, including unmanned aircraft, long-range munitions, and alternative propulsion systems. Its product lineup includes Viper, a jet-powered vertical lift vehicle; Stratos, an airborne surveillance system; and Dart, a counter-drone interceptor; and the company has said it plans to move at least three of these systems into mass production by late 2026 or 2027, according to TechEchelon.
The company's growth has been rapid by any startup's standard. Mach raised $300 million in Series C funding in June 2026, pushing its valuation to $1.8 billion — nearly four times its $470 million Series B valuation from a year earlier, TechEchelon reported. Mach has received several U.S. Department of Defense contracts, and the Navy awarded it a contract in June for an innovative long-range strike drone project, part of what PR Newswire described as the Defense Innovation Unit's award for the Navy's Runway Independent Maritime Expeditionary Strike program, aimed at building a hybrid-electric drone called Atlas capable of launching a 1,000-pound payload 1,400 nautical miles from destroyers without a flight deck.
Betting on Vertical Integration
Mach has also been buying its way into the supply chain rather than waiting on it. The company acquired Victorville-based solid rocket motor developer Exquadrum for $50 million in cash and equity in May, creating a new business unit called Mach Energetics, according to the Orange County Business Journal. Solid rocket motors face severe supply shortages industrywide, with legacy contractors like Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman carrying multi-year lead times, the publication noted. Through the Exquadrum deal, Mach also inherited government subcontracting work tied to the Golden Dome national missile defense initiative, adding liquid propulsion testing and solid rocket motor development to its portfolio.
Mach is reportedly expected to have four new production facilities by the end of 2026, per TechCrunch. Whether Fort Worth becomes one of them may come down to the same multi-state bidding dynamic that has already shaped the company's expansion elsewhere. California's CalCompetes tax credit committee approved a $55 million award for Mach in April — the largest single allocation in a $221 million state incentive package — as Hoodline previously reported, underscoring that Texas is not the only state courting the company.
Fort Worth's Defense Manufacturing Push
The AllianceTexas development where Mach is eyeing space has been building toward this kind of deal for decades. Since 1989, the 27,000-acre master-planned corridor developed by Ross Perot Jr.'s Hillwood has attracted more than 600 companies, created upward of 73,000 direct jobs, and generated an estimated $142.9 billion in cumulative regional economic impact. Hillwood is a financial supporter of the Fort Worth Report. Fort Worth's broader aerospace and defense cluster employs more than 23,500 workers across six North Texas counties with an average annual wage exceeding $100,000, a talent base city officials have leaned on to attract firms like Lockheed Martin and Bell Helicopter to the region.
Whether Mach ultimately lands in Fort Worth remains unresolved, with the company's final site decision not expected until the third quarter. If it does choose Alliance Gateway 34, it would join a growing list of defense and aerospace manufacturers putting down roots in North Fort Worth's industrial corridors alongside the incentive-backed expansions of Lockheed Martin and Bell that have defined the area's recent economic development strategy.
