Companies Deliver Autonomous Strike Aircraft from Concept to Flight in 71 Days
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Today, Divergent Technologies and Mach Industries announced a partnership to deliver Venom, a prototype flight demonstration aircraft showing hardware development at software speed.
“This partnership between Mach Industries and Divergent demonstrates a pivotal capability for the nation. By combining Mach’s innovative systems with Divergent’s revolutionary digital manufacturing platform, we’ve moved from concept to a flight-ready prototype in 71 days,” said Alex Lovett, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of War for Mission Capabilities in the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering (OUSW(R&E)). “This isn’t just an impressive metric—it’s a direct enabler of our strategy to achieve affordable mass and support the SECWAR’s ‘Drone Dominance’ vision. ODASW(P&E) is committed to sponsoring collaborations like this that accelerate rapid acquisition and deliver urgent, low-cost munitions to the warfighter.”
Mach Industries 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 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.
“Going from inception to flight in 71 days is a clear demonstration of what’s possible when Divergent’s Adaptive Production System is utilized from day one. This is what production at the speed of relevance looks like,” said Lukas Czinger, Co-Founder and CEO of Divergent. “Most importantly, Divergent will drive the rapid scale-up of this system, producing thousands of airframes annually. Partnering with Mach has been an immediate win and reflects two mission-aligned, innovative companies executing at maximum pace.”
Enabled by Divergent’s Adaptive Production System (DAPSTM), Divergent collapses traditional multi-hundred-part assemblies into unified additively manufactured structures to accelerate production, achieve superior mass and performance, and dramatically reduce overall part count.
“Over the last 18 months Mach has taken four products from concept to flight test through rapid iteration, and Divergent’s adaptive tech stack has been instrumental in accelerating that iteration,” said Ethan Thornton, Founder and CEO of Mach. “Mach’s selection for a production contract is the first of many opportunities to show not only speed to prototype, but speed to scaled manufacturing.”
By leveraging a common simulation and controls foundation, Mach Industries is able to support high-fidelity prototyping and adaptable iteration across hardware and software. The result: a framework that enabled parallel development, accelerated validation, and achieving concept-to-first-flight in 71 days.
Together, Divergent and Mach Industries are demonstrating a new model for autonomous defense systems, replacing tooling-heavy aerospace processes with a software-defined manufacturing approach that enables rapid iteration, scalable production, and speed to field. With Venom, the companies are showing that advanced manufacturing is not only an efficiency advantage, it is a strategic capability that delivers operational systems at the speed, volume, and performance demanded by modern defense missions.
About Divergent Technologies
Divergent has created the world’s first end-to-end software-hardware production system for industrial digital manufacturing – the Divergent Adaptive Production System (DAPS™) – allowing customers to design, additively manufacture, and automatically assemble complex structures for automotive, aerospace, and defense applications. DAPS transforms the economics, speed, and scalability of defense vehicle manufacturing by optimizing designs, dematerializing structures, and eliminating upfront capex. For more information, please visit www.divergent3d.com
About Mach Industries
Founded in 2023, Mach Industries is a defense manufacturing company headquartered in Huntington Beach, California. The company develops advanced unmanned systems and the manufacturing infrastructure to scale their production. By vertically integrating weapons, propulsion, and manufacturing, Mach delivers the speed, adaptability, and resilience required to preserve military advantage. www.machindustries.com
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SOURCE Divergent Technologies, Inc.
