Divergent and Mach partner on Venom autonomous strike aircraft
Divergent Technologies, based in Torrance, California, USA, and Mach Industries, Huntington Beach, California, have announced a partnership to deliver Venom, a prototype flight demonstration aircraft with an additively manufactured structure.
“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 seventy-one days,” stated 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 Secretary of War’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 technology architecture with a modular, open-systems architecture to accelerate development from concept to flight. Divergent executed the digital design and Additive Manufacturing of the Venom structure, including wings, fuselage, skins, and control surfaces as monolithic assemblies rather than conventional multi-part builds.
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The Divergent Adaptive Production System (DAPS) enables the company to collapse traditional multi-hundred-part assemblies into unified additively manufactured structures. This accelerates production, achieves superior mass and performance, and reduces overall part count.
“Going from inception to flight in seventy-one days is a clear demonstration of what’s possible when Divergent’s Adaptive Production System is utilised from day one. This is what production at the speed of relevance looks like,” added 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.”
Ethan Thornton, founder and CEO of Mach, stated, “Over the last eighteen 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. 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 achieved concept-to-first-flight in seventy-one days.
Together, Divergent and Mach Industries aim to demonstrate a new model for autonomous defence systems, replacing tooling-heavy aerospace processes with a software-defined manufacturing approach that enables rapid iteration, scalable production, and speed to field.
