At Machina in Chatsworth, two workers are bent over a large platform, tightening bolts into a freshly assembled robotic factory. Not even 7 feet away, the same robotic factory is pressing into a sheet of metal, creating ripples that will eventually form the surface of a drone.
These small, compact factories – located at the company’s 75,000-square-foot facility – are equipped with two robotic arms and extensive code that enables them to produce everything from military drones to automotive parts to replicas of a person’s head.
The drones are designed to be placed anywhere, from defense bases to U.S. allied countries – and possibly one day on the moon.
That is the true goal of Machina, according to founder and Chief Executive Edward Mehr, though the world looks a bit different today. When he launched the company in 2019, national interest goals didn’t prominently feature manufacturing. When former President Joe Biden was elected in 2020, his administration began to promote domestic manufacturing through legislation such as the CHIPS and Science Act to reduce the U.S.’s dependence on other countries. President Donald Trump’s administration significantly expanded on that idea.
Machina, formerly called Machina Labs, and similar companies have risen to prominence, securing private and Department of War contracts worth millions to produce military equipment like drones more quickly and cheaply than before, aiming to compete with geopolitical rivals. Machina serves customers across defense giants like Lockheed Martin, auto industry leaders like Toyota, and even theme parks seeking to develop realistic ride accessories – though Mehr won’t specify the parts of Universal Studios on which he has worked.
Despite juggling several million dollars, iron-clad contracts, and the day-to-day minutiae of running a business today, Mehr is setting his sights on something more akin to the amorphous, science fiction world his company is built for.
Mehr sat down with the Business Journal to discuss how he envisions the role Machina will play on the global stage, and on other planets.
Let’s start with the genesis of this company. How did someone who studied software engineering get this deep into hardware and manufacturing?
I went to school for computer engineering, and when I started grad school, my focus mostly was on machine learning and a little of robotics. I used to do these long-term internships at the Microsofts and Googles of the world until one day I stepped into a SpaceX factory.
What were you doing at SpaceX?
So, I joined as a software engineer but ended up working on a whole bunch of other things. I ended up working a lot of our manufacturing processes. And these were in the early days at SpaceX, where you could kind of pick and choose. It was a little bit of a wild mess. That’s where I started getting familiar with how tough manufacturing is compared to the software world. When I was at Google or Microsoft, we could come up with an idea, and then the next day, we could put it on thousands of servers. At SpaceX, you have an idea, you think about it, and then, two years later, maybe you have to build the machinery for it and put the equipment in there.
So it kind of became really real that the real bottleneck is how fast can we move, how fast we can actually get from our designs to manufacturing. That’s a real bottleneck for growth in these hardware companies.
As a reporter, I used to cover biotech for a bit, and I find many parallels between the two industries. You have very long lead times, need a lot of money and might not even end up with a successful product. But if you do, it’s super successful. I imagine pure software plays did well with venture firms for a while because they were faster to market and required less investment than hardware or pharma.
Exactly. I think at the time, they were all excited about the fact that they could get to profitability and revenue fast. Now it’s time to realize if something can be built fast, it can be replaced fast. I think now they’ve come to realize that actually building hardware companies, there’s inherent work in it. Once something takes 10 to 20 years to build, the next guy cannot just come in and replace you.
Since then, I’ve been at this intersection of, can we make manufacturing more software-like? Can we enable it so that, like you have an idea, and instead of 10 years later … (can) you have a product out (six months later)?
I started Machina as a more fundamental solution to this next generation of factories. What are the core technologies we need to build so they can have a factory that, in the morning, can make missile parts, and in the afternoon, can make rocket parts, and at night, it can make aircraft?
You started the company in 2019. I’m curious about how the thesis of Machina has evolved, if at all, from then to now. Now we’re living in a world where the federal government is leading the charge to promote domestic manufacturing and update military readiness.
I think the thesis honestly hasn’t changed. The vision was always, ‘How do we collapse the gap between a design intent?’ We would love to live in a world where you come up with an idea, you can go on a website, and it guides you through how (to) make it manufacturable. You push a button, and a facility in L.A., near where you live, starts making it in volumes that you want to ship it to.
But I think the tactics definitely changed from administration to administration. Biden was very pro-manufacturing. I think with Trump, it became a little bit more defense-focused. I think with Russia attacking Ukraine, we started feeling a little bit more urgency.
Defense funding really blew up when Trump came into office. Under Biden, advanced manufacturing firms raised $25.4 billion from 2021 to 2025. Since Trump took office, the sector has raised $32.3 billion in venture dollars in less than two years. This is all according to PitchBook.
Defense always was the early adopter of manufacturing technologies because that’s where you need agility, where you’re willing to take more risks on new technologies. But we always also knew that we wanted to be a dual-use company, so that’s why we also pursued automotive and some of the other commercial customers.
How much of your long-term strategy lies in defense and military tech? Obviously, Machina is a company; it has to make money. But when I talk to other companies in this space, there is this sense of, like, this isn’t just dollars and cents. Personal and moral values drive this sector, reflecting the people who make up this industry.
We’re not a weapons manufacturer, but we’re in the supply chain of manufacturing. Again, we also have a dual-use business, right? Toyota is probably our second biggest customer in the commercial world. We were just at Toyota headquarters yesterday, and there we actually enabled something new that didn’t exist before. For the first time, you can go buy a customized vehicle to truly express yourself with your car. That wasn’t possible technologically before. And that’s actually more aligned with what we are long-term.
If you think about the vision of closing the gap between the design intent of physical products, what does that enable? That just enables this sci-fi future that we’re all excited about, where there’s like all kinds of designs out there. No building looks the same. No car looks the same. No airplane looks the same. As a supplier, I think the morality of what’s being built really lies with our customers.
Manufacturing is a core human expression. Like defense is one expression – a lot of times the early adopter – but, likely if you come back in five years, defense is going to be much smaller.
If history repeats itself, the military and weapons sector will slow down at some point. You worked with 30 different brands in 2023 that spanned all kinds of commercial use cases. Are there other things where you’re like, we could use the technology – the physical product, the proprietary data, whatever it is – to do this other thing that hasn’t ever been done before?
I think defense actually has created a lot of noise in this environment. I think the real excitement is around what kind of manufacturing do we require for the future we want to live in?
What will manufacturing look like when you are in a world where there’s autonomous cars? In a world where we’re going to have all kinds of drones and air taxis. In a world where there are going to be floating cities? Where are we manufacturing out on Mars?
I think there’s a lot of political conversation around manufacturing that’s like: ‘Oh, we need to beat China.’ That’s great. Sure. We need to make cheap stuff. We need to make stuff fast – otherwise, China will lead us. That’s a real danger. But that being said, I’m more excited about how we’re going to manufacture on the moon. That’s a topic for another conversation, probably.
It is interesting to think about in the future, the things we manufacture will have its own unique set of bottlenecks that we can’t predict and prepare for today. But we will need to one day.
Exactly. Good companies, for me, are the companies who like to start from that human desire for thinking, ‘What does it look like in 100 years?’ And what is (the life) you all want to live?’ But then find the way to today and figure out what the steps they need to take today are. Part of it might be (that) I’ll be venture-funded; I’ll do a defense company, but as long as that motion makes sense.
