Why We Founded Westmag
Building the great American motor company
America | Tech | Opinion | Culture | Charts
America does not make the motors that move its drones and its robots. We started Westmag to change that.
Most aerial drones fly with four electric motors. Robots move using many actuators, each with a motor at its core—thirty or more in the case of a humanoid. These are the parts that turn electricity into motion, the muscle of every machine that moves through the physical world. For decades, almost all of that muscle has been built overseas, which means every American drone company, every robotics company, and every defense prime has been building on a foundation it does not control.
We did not start Westmag to make a marginally better motor. A slightly better part was never the point. What matters is being able to make a great many of them, here, on a platform built to serve drones and robots alike. America has never made this category at scale, and that gap is opening right as demand for it explodes.
The numbers are not subtle. Over the next five years, demand for high-performance motors and actuators across drones, humanoids, quadrupeds, and other mobile robots will exceed everything the domestic industry has ever produced, by orders of magnitude. China builds more than thirty million more drone motors and robot actuators every year than the United States does. You do not close a gap like that with a research project. You close it by building factories, and you close it fast.
As these industries ramp, what customers need most is not exotic—it is a supplier who can deliver high-performance motors and actuators reliably, in volume, at a cost that works. Right now no one in America is doing it at the scale the moment demands, so OEMs are forced to choose between a foundation they can’t control and a domestic option that can’t yet meet their volumes. We are building Westmag to end that tradeoff — to be the supplier our customers can plan their roadmaps around.
The way we get there is by vertically integrating design, manufacturing, and supply chain. At Factory 01, our launch facility and headquarters in South San Francisco, we design our own motors and actuators on a shared architecture, then wind, assemble, and validate them on a single integrated production platform — flexible automation and replicable modules, so the same building blocks scale across a wide mix of customers and applications.
The ramp is the whole game. We are already shipping against a committed book of orders for hundreds of thousands of units, and we are scaling toward annual capacity of more than 30 million units before 2030. To get there, we are investing upstream in heavy industrial capacity for subcomponent production — electromagnet stator steel stamping, rare-earth magnet finishing — to drive cost engineering and greater control across the entire bill of materials.
This is the layer everything else gets built on. When the critical component underneath an entire industry comes from a supply base you can’t see into and can’t depend on, it caps how fast that industry can move. Flip it around and the advantages compound: a reliable, cost-effective domestic supply of motors and actuators lets American drone and robot companies design faster, price better, and scale without flinching—and those gains build on each other year over year.
We are doing this with partners, not in isolation, and building our supply chain with key suppliers in the U.S. and in allied countries, including Japan, where we already have several close partners. A national motor and actuator industry cannot be rebuilt from scratch overnight, and the fastest path is to pair domestic capacity with the best of what allied manufacturing already does well.
The conviction that brought us here has only sharpened since we started. When the Federal Communications Commission moved in December 2025 to restrict the sale of new foreign-made drones and critical components, including motors, it confirmed what our customers had been telling us for years. Demand for a serious domestic supplier is rapidly accelerating.
People ask why build it here. There are plenty of strategic answers, and they all hold up. But the most honest one is simpler: this is home. We are talking about one of the largest and most strategically important industries in history — so why would we build it anywhere else?
We are early and we are moving fast. A real book of orders. A production line already ramping. A clear runway from hundreds of thousands of units this year to tens of millions per year by the end of the decade.
At Westmag, we’re building the great American motor company — designed and built here, serving the global drone and robot market.
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