In this episode, I'm digging into the surprisingly overlooked world of electric motors with Ankit Somani of Conifer, a startup aiming to revolutionize these unsung workhorses of the energy system. We explore their ambitious approach to making motors lighter, more efficient, and cheaper to build, all while ditching problematic rare-earth magnets.
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David Roberts
All right, hello everyone. This is Volts for June 11, 2025, "Making electric motors better." I'm your host, David Robert. Here on Volts, we have covered all sorts of electrical devices and technologies, from solar panels to batteries, appliances, and EVs. But there is one technology at the very heart of the electricity system that receives strangely little attention from those of us in the clean energy space.
I'm talking about the humble motor. Electric motors are found everywhere from scooters and leaf blowers to HVAC equipment, water pumps, cars, and planes. Something like 50 percent of the world's electricity flows through them. And if we're going to complete the energy transition, then everything that now runs on a fossil-fueled engine will eventually have to run on an electric motor.
Yet, I have given motors scarcely a passing thought over the years and have seen very little discussion of the subject in clean energy circles. It's been nagging me for the last year or two, and I've been waiting for the right opportunity, so I was pleased when the folks from Conifer got in touch.
Conifer, which just received its first $20 million in seed funding, is designing electric motors and drivetrains that are lighter, more efficient, more cheaply manufactured, and made without rare-earth magnets. Or so they say! I'm going to talk with co-founder Ankit Somani today about how to improve motors and what the future holds for them.
All right then, with no further ado, Ankit Somani, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Ankit Somani
Thank you, David. It's great to be here.
David Roberts
Let's talk about how you ended up here. So, you're what they call a serial entrepreneur. You've had your hands in a lot of different clean energy businesses over the years. So, you look around for your next big thing. Why motors? Why motors and powertrains? What's the logic that brought you here?
Ankit Somani
You know, just like for most folks, my career has been long and windy as well. I actually first came to the US in about, I think, 2007, right in the middle of the financial crisis to do a master's in data center cooling. Yeah, as you can imagine, it's a hot topic now.
David Roberts
Very prescient. Yeah, well, it was a good call.
Ankit Somani
So, it was a long time ago, but had a really good program around that and then spent years in Oracle and Google designing different cooling and electrical equipment for data centers. It was a very focused R&D team, so had an early background around motors and different aspects of it back then. But then forgot all about it for the longest time. So, the first startup I did that was in conversational AI, a very different space. We had a good opportunity to scale and then eventually sell that company. And then I reconnected with an old friend of mine from undergraduate who has been living and breathing motors since third year college.
So, he did his PhD in electric motors, had recently designed electric powertrains for Apple's secret car project, and then for Lucid. So, lots of deep background there. And we started chatting about the problems across the board in motors all the way from how we choose the supply chain for it, what sort of manufacturing processes exist today, what are challenges from a design and performance standpoint. And the biggest takeaway we had was if we really want to see a lot more electrification and physical automation — you know, we are sort of stuck in the 5 to 10% penetration in that world — and if you really want to see something which goes way above 50% penetration, then you have to think about the electric engine from the ground up.
I use the word engine because, just like fuel tanks, a battery is an energy store. But you got to take that and convert it into a spinning wheel or a spinning fan on the other side. So, everything in the middle is the engine itself. And you have to think about it ground up across all of these three areas. We had a few innovations in mind and one thing led to another, and here we are.
David Roberts
I suspect lots of listeners are roughly like me in this area, which is floundering in near total ignorance of physical engineering. So, you'll have to be patient with me as we walk through this. But a motor is part of a powertrain, which consists of the motor, there's an inverter, a gearbox, and some sort of control software. If you add all those up together, is that sort of the equivalent of a fossil-fueled engine? Like, a fossil-fueled engine has all those bits in it?
Ankit Somani
That's exactly right. You described it perfectly.
David Roberts
So, powertrain is like the electric equivalent of an engine, basically.
Ankit Somani
Correct.
David Roberts
And you are at Conifer, working on motors, but also, as I understand it, working on inverters, gearboxes, and control software. The whole package.
Ankit Somani
That's right, yeah. We are a verticalized electric powertrain company and not only on each of these three or four aspects that you mentioned, which is motor, inverter, gearbox, control software, but also we have experts internally reinventing the manufacturing process and automating it.
David Roberts
So, is it your experience... like, am I right, that this is an odd sort of lacuna? You know, there's so much activity around clean energy these days. So much excitement, so many startups, you know, it's buzzing. I'm not wrong, right, that it's a little weird that the heart of all this, the engine that drives trains at the heart of all this, have had very little attention paid to them by all this wave of entrepreneurs? Like, is there activity in this area that I've just been missing or am I right that like, it's been neglected?
Ankit Somani
No, you're absolutely right. And that was actually an observation we also had when you arrived about two and a half years ago, where if you look at the battery world in the last 15 years, there's been so much investment, so much good talent that has gone in there, so much focus. And around the world, like all the way from battery chemistry to the anode to the cathode to recycling, the whole process. Every different aspect of it. So, batteries got maybe a thousand times more venture capital and maybe a million times more attention.
An electric motor, the humble electric motor that has served us for over 100 years, people had forgotten about it. They thought, "Hey, we think it's a one and done problem," but there's so much to it that was worth solving.
David Roberts
So, as I understand it, and tell me if I'm right about this, Conifer has sort of three big innovations that I would like to walk through one at a time. The first is you're making an axial flux motor rather than a radial flux motor. We'll get to what that means. The second is you are using iron-based magnets rather than rare-earth-based magnets, which has big supply chain implications that we'll get to. And the third is these innovations in the manufacturing process, basically making it easier and cheaper to manufacture these things. Are those roughly the big three?
Is that roughly the menu here?
Ankit Somani
Yeah, that's very close to it. And within the actual flux itself, we have reinvented the core stator itself, which essentially enables all these three things and makes it possible.
David Roberts
Got it. Okay, so let's start with — I spent a couple of nights ago, several hours falling down a YouTube rabbit hole about radial versus axial flux motors. Turns out there's a lot of material out there, a lot of strong feelings, oddly strong feelings about these engineering decisions. So, if I can just describe this very basically and tell me if this is correct, there are two basic parts to the electric motor. There's the stator, which is the static component that contains the copper coils. And then there's the rotor, which is the moving component. That basically is moving magnets past the copper coils, and that's what generates the electricity, is moving magnets past electric coils.
So, in a radial flux motor, the stator, the static bit, is like a cylindrical tube, and the rotor is inserted into that tube. It's like a little cylinder inside a bigger cylinder. That's what radial means. That has to do with the angle of the magnetic field toward the magnets — but I don't know that we need to really get into that. Axial flux is, rather than a tube inserted in another tube, it's like two discs next to each other. Like, think of dinner plates or something right next to each other. One is the stator containing the coils, one is the rotor containing the magnets, and the one spins next to the other one.
That's an axial flux motor. Is that roughly correct?
Ankit Somani
Very good. I feel like within two days itself, you almost became an expert across all of these things. By the way, I'll add a fun fact. Nikola Tesla's first patent on electric motors — this is back in the late 1800s — that was for an axial flux motor.
David Roberts
Interesting.
Ankit Somani
And even though 90, 95% or even higher motors in the world today are radial flux motors, that's where both manufacturability and innovations were over the last century.
David Roberts
Yeah, can we explain that a little bit better? Why did radial, like, as you say, something like 95% of the electric motors around us today, are radial flux motors? Is there an easy-to-understand reason why they came to be so dominant?
Ankit Somani
Yeah, actually, when electric motors first started, they didn't even necessarily have magnets in them. So, your rotor was excited. You basically created an artificial magnet by rotors also having copper coils and current going through them. The connection itself is much simpler when you do that in a radial flux configuration. So, it's easier to get started that way. And then, as you know, these things are always incremental. People build on top of each other. A once forgotten architecture, now with the right permanent magnets or the right coil winding, actually has much better advantages than the typical radial flux motor.
David Roberts
Yeah, yeah. As I understand it, you get a bunch of advantages from going axial flux instead of radial flux. But as I understand it, the thing that's tricky about it is just that it's a little bit more precise and a little bit more difficult to manufacture. That's why there's not been a larger move in that direction. And you guys presumably are tackling that problem. Tell us quickly then, what are the advantages of axial flux over radial flux?
Ankit Somani
In an axial flux motor, or actually any motor, the way you determine how much force that motor is able to generate, which in motor parlance, is called torque. Torque is essentially force over a distance. In a radial flux motor, what happens is your cylinder, as you were talking about, that is inserted, the spinning cylinder, which is inserted in the static cylinder. That's at a much lower radius. And so the force that you have to produce is a lot more so that your torque is still similar because your distance is small, because it's a small cylinder. Small radius cylinder.
David Roberts
So, it's just as simple as, like the spinning part on an axial flux motor is larger, it has a larger radius, and thus it's sort of, you know, swinging around a larger perimeter.
Ankit Somani
Yeah. Think of it as the force generating part, which is where the magnet is in, is right next to it. It's called the air gap in that parlance. But where the magnet is right next to the stator coils itself, that's much further out in an axial flux system. So now, if you can make it further out, but also at the same time generate a higher magnetic field as well as spin it faster, then you can generate a lot more torque as well as power from the same amount of material compared to a radial flux system.
David Roberts
So, the basic and perhaps most key advantage here is that you can make them smaller. You can get more torque out of the same amount of material or alternatively, an equal amount of torque out of a smaller motor.
Ankit Somani
Correct. And the term that's used very often is power or torque density, which technically is power produced over a volume of space that you occupy. But even as power over weight, like kilograms or pounds, even that can be much higher in an axial flux system.
David Roberts
And as you said, you guys did not invent axial flux motors. They've been around for centuries, and they're even around a lot today. How is your sort of torque per volume relative to other axial flux motors? Like, are you pushing the boundaries on that particular metric?
Ankit Somani
Yeah, absolutely. So, there were changes we made in the stator itself, which allowed us to compact a lot more electrical conductors in the same space.
David Roberts
Coils, right? Those are the copper coils, right?
Ankit Somani
That's right. And that's the principle of electromagnetism that a motor is based on, because a current-carrying conductor produces a magnetic field around it. So now, in layman's terms, if you can have a lot more conductor in the same space, while effectively being able to cool them because they run hot as well.
David Roberts
Yes, this is something I ran into as a problem. The heat, dissipating that heat. So, you've crammed in more copper coils and figured out some way to disperse the heat from them.
Ankit Somani
That's right. And cramming it in doing two different things. One, it generates a much stronger magnetic field, but at the same time, cramming it in a way such that the manufacturing process in fact becomes much simpler than a typical radial flux system. So not only have we made axial flux feasible, more feasible rather at scale, but it has become a tenth simpler than a typical radial flux system in terms of winding that coil.
David Roberts
And here, you're just referring literally to the physical manufacturing process of getting the coils into the stator and completing the stator. That process, you've made it easier.
Ankit Somani
That's right. Making the coil, making sure it's in the right place in the stator, and making sure we can do it with the least amount of, or least complicated, manufacturing process that we have invented.
David Roberts
Right. So, you can make these smaller. You can get the same amount of torque out of a smaller motor. So that, I think, explains your business plan, which is starting basically with small motors. The second innovation is in the magnets. Typical electric motors use magnets that are made out of rare earths — neodymium. Did I say that right?
Ankit Somani
Yes, you got it.
David Roberts
Neodymium is the main one, I think. And there are, I think, a couple of others involved. And of course, listeners to Volts know that China completely dominates the mining and even more particularly the processing of rare-earth minerals. So insofar as all electric devices require motors and all electric motors require rare-earths, China has, you know, power over not just our electrical grid. I mean, they have some trade power over, you know, our lawnmowers and cars and everything else that has an engine in it. So there are economic and national security reasons to move away from rare-earths.
Long story short. So, how did you do this? Because my understanding is that the reason you use rare-earth magnets is that they are particularly potent, powerful. You're replacing them with ferrite, which is, as I understand it, basically iron. So, how are you compensating for that loss of power?
Ankit Somani
Yeah, by the way, ferrite magnets are 86% rust. So, it is literally, literally ferrous oxide, 86% rust. And these are the same magnets that you would find in your, you know, the kitchen fridge, stickies that you have which stick well on your kitchen fridge. Those are the ferrite magnets. It's the same. So, there are two key challenges that had to be solved. First, as I was talking about earlier, if you can generate higher magnetic flux from your coils, which we talked about from our state of technology, we can. Then, you can pair it with a weaker magnet.
So, that is the first innovation, and that helps from a torque standpoint. Now, very simply, like the way you think about power. In a typical world, it's force times velocity, and in the motor world, it tends to be torque times how fast you can spin it. So, if you have to increase power density now, if you've gotten torque to a good point, now you have to spin the motor faster to be able to do that. So, one of the challenges you have with ferrite material is it's like ceramic material. You know, if you've ever had something ceramic and it has fallen, slipped out of your hands, you see it breaking very quickly.
David Roberts
Yeah. Brittle.
Ankit Somani
It's the same problem with ferrite magnets. So, we figured out how to structurally save it. When you spin it at much, much higher speeds, structurally strengthen it.
David Roberts
So, it literally just holds together at higher speeds.
Ankit Somani
It holds together much better at higher speeds. Make sure the integrity is good. So, it was partly because we had a better stator and partly because we figured out structural challenges from a ferrite standpoint. That's what allows us to use a weaker magnet. It's not just a weaker magnet, by the way, it's much, much more cost-effective, like, compared to rare-earth magnets —
David Roberts
I mean, iron is, you know, abundant, let's say. Not expensive.
Ankit Somani
It's less than half the cost of copper itself per pound. It's that cheap.
David Roberts
And very easy to get anywhere. You don't need a foreign supply chain. So, by getting more out of your coils and by spinning faster, you've basically compensated for moving from a stronger magnet to a weaker one. And so, this is allowing you to use much cheaper magnets and magnets that don't require foreign supply chains, basically.
Ankit Somani
That's right.
David Roberts
Before we get to the manufacturing part, let's just talk about what you're going to do with this new motor you've got. What is the sort of first step on the business plan?
Ankit Somani
You know, one statistic that blew our minds when we started looking into it more deeply is that there are 1 billion small gas engines that exist in the world.
David Roberts
I know. And they're the dirtiest per weight per unit. The dirtiest fossil fuel technologies. Almost these little like scooters and leaf blowers and all those little things.
Ankit Somani
Exactly. In fact, California has a very interesting acronym for it. It's called SORE. They're literally SORE, small off-road gas engines. And you know, you're right, they're dirty in terms of SOx and NOx emissions. While the world focused on cars and trucks, we sort of forgot about making these better. And just for reference, by the way, when I say 1 billion gas engines, there are about 1.4 billion cars. So it's roughly in the same order of magnitude that exists in the world. And so that's the market we want to target because it's often forgotten but extremely important from an electrification standpoint.
David Roberts
So, where are those motors? Like, those billion motors presumably are clustered in a few big product categories. Where are they?
Ankit Somani
There's so many different applications. I'll name a few. There are two-wheelers, small delivery vehicles, three-wheelers. You have all sorts of power tools and equipment. If you've used a pressure washer, you would see it in that. If you use a commercial lawnmower, you'll see it in that. You have agricultural equipment. Almost all agricultural equipment have that. It's really spread across many, many different applications. The thing we wanted to solve is with a few different SKUs, can you address most of these applications? Because then you can create something standardized. Like let's say you go to a place that sells you gas engines, you can say, "Oh, I need a Honda 5 horsepower gas engine," and they'll give you a standardized unit that comes out.
So, what's the equivalent of that that we can produce, which people can just deploy?
David Roberts
So, that engine can go in a number of different applications. And so, similarly, you're trying to make a motor that can sort of work into all these different applications.
Ankit Somani
Absolutely. And this is a big part of our story, but it's only part of our story. There's a whole set of stationary applications which are, you know, we were talking about data centers earlier, but all sorts of fans, pumps, all the physical industrial automation.
David Roberts
Talk about things people don't think about. We're surrounded by those, and they're practically invisible.
Ankit Somani
There's a reason why 50% of the world's energy goes through these motors. They are everywhere.
David Roberts
Yeah. When I started reading about water pumps, I was like, "Wow, that is wild." You really are surrounded by those. And so, we have electric motors now; you can get an electric leaf blower. So, does your little motor outperform whatever little motors are in today's leaf blowers? What are those motors in today's leaf blowers? What's wrong with the sort of, you know, like why aren't they spreading faster? What's wrong with today's small electric motors?
Ankit Somani
Very good question. So, there are two or three factors that really will matter for us to go from, as we were talking about earlier, the 10% or so electrification to 50, 60, 70% electrification. First is, do they do the job in a way that consumers like, which means low noise. If you think about leaf blowers, I don't want to carry something 10, 20 pounds in my hand all the time. Are they light? At the end of the day, are they cheap enough? Because the next set of consumers, they don't think about being green, they just think about whether it is affordable, reliable, and more cost-effective.
That's what they care about. So, it's those factors that you need to push on. And now, with rare-earth material coming more into the spotlight, you need to solve for supply chain issues. One of the biggest things we see recently is customers coming to us and saying, "Hey, we are not able to get enough of them." And it's like long lead times associated with it because there are some critical parts coming from very supply chain constrained global places. So, it's across all of these factors that you can make an improvement.
David Roberts
One of the things you boast about your stator is that it's much lighter, like your whole motor is lighter than existing motors. How is that? Where are you saving the mass?
Ankit Somani
So, a very common material that is used in electric motors is called silicon steel. And we have eliminated 95% of silicon steel from our stator itself. We also use 20% less copper at the same time. By the way, the reduction in steel is not just in the actual material itself, but the way steel is put into these motors. There's a lot of scrap material generated and we are again, we've innovated on that. In our case, the amount of scrap that is generated is very, very low. So, it's also a much simpler process.
David Roberts
Did you substitute some material in particular for the steel?
Ankit Somani
No. So, there's no switch in bait. There's no, "Oh, we're not talking about some fancy material that we are using that others don't." It is simply the right manufacturing process coupled with the right design. And then that allows us to also use other simpler materials like the rare-earth-free magnets, which are iron magnets on top of it. So, we need to take inspiration from how IC engines were made, where there were simple materials, simple processes made across the world. That's how electric motors and electric engines need to be. Not like complicated materials or complicated processes.
It needs to be as simple as IC engines for it to be prolific.
David Roberts
So, your first two products, just to get back to the business plan here real quickly, the first two products are a motor that is sort of freestanding and can go in pumps and stuff like that. And then what I found very interesting is this in-wheel motor that you're making. Well, I guess, that is technically a drivetrain because in the wheel you have the motor and the gearbox and everything. So, talk a little bit about your innovations outside the motor in the inverter and gearbox and control software and stuff like that. Like, are you also pushing ahead on those?
Ankit Somani
Yeah, absolutely. So, our core product, the product that we started with, is an in-wheel solution. And our vision there is, you actually should not be putting motors in the chassis itself as much as possible.
David Roberts
And that's up to what size, you know, what's the limit on that? You mean even like cars, big trucks?
Ankit Somani
I absolutely believe that cars and trucks are going in the direction of not requiring motors inside the chassis. It'll be all in the wheels.
David Roberts
And this is something like I read a very sort of excitable, futuristic, etc. book about electric vehicles way back in like, I don't know, it was like 2007 or something. And one of the things that the engineers were most excited about were these in-wheel motors. Because that just frees up the design space. Like, design-wise, it's incredible. It just completely opens a blank slate everywhere else. Right. Like, you can put any platform, any structure, any kind of vehicle. Like, if you have the motor in the wheel, you can build anything on top of those.
Like, you know, the sky's the limit.
Ankit Somani
Yeah, exactly. And imagine, as simple as, "I'm going to take this wheel, I'm going to connect this with this chassis, and boom, I have a new kind of platform that I can work with versus custom designing for each vehicle." And you're absolutely right, it's been the dream for electric vehicle makers for the longest time to have a solution like that. So, we are big believers, very long on that. And that required innovation. Not just in the motor, which is very compact for us, and we have this modularity element to like, we can have a single motor or a tandem motor or three motors, like in the same packaging very easily.
David Roberts
Right. Because the axial flux motors, as I said earlier, are like discs next to each other. So, it's really just like stacking discs.
Ankit Somani
The world thinks of them as pancake motors. That is the form factor. And so now we have connected that with a special gearbox that we made internally, which is also very pancakey. And together with both of them, the system just disappears inside the wheel and so nothing sort of juts out and delivers amazing power density. So that's on the gearbox itself, the changes that we had to make.
David Roberts
And I'm just curious, this in-wheel motor, like, because when I think about wheels, there's just, you know, there's a lot of different kinds of wheels, there's a lot of different kinds of vehicles, a lot of different sizes, a lot of different, you know, weights on top of them, etc. Sort of how agnostic is this in-wheel motor? Is it the same basic thing that goes in all these different kinds of wheels or do you have to do like a different design per wheel category? You know what I mean?
Ankit Somani
Yeah, this was a key decision for us and a key value proposition of what we are doing. So, typically, what happens is there have been these products that have existed in the market called hub motors. Now, hub motors live inside the wheel as well, but they tend to spin with the wheel. And every time you change the size or shape of the wheel, you have to basically use a different kind of hub motor. So, that's your least scalable option. What we are doing is something that is in-wheel but is decoupled from the wheel. So, you can basically take the same motor and gearbox and you can put it on a 12-inch wheel, on a 10-inch wheel, on a 16-inch wheel and you can deliver different performance.
So, we are able to get to a wide variety of applications with just two or three SKUs on the motor and gearbox side.
David Roberts
Interesting. So, I'm assuming that the motor that's going to work, you know, across a two-wheeler, a three-wheeler, is not also going to work in a car. Like, presumably, you do have a bigger version of this.
Ankit Somani
That's right.
David Roberts
But are you currently able to make one that could run an actual car or are you working up to that?
Ankit Somani
Yeah, we have some interesting small car customers as well. So, we obviously have to focus in one area and that's a way from a business standpoint we just need to be more focused. But, we have got an interest and have checked out feasibility across a bunch of different applications. And you're right, it's not going to be the same motor across all of it. But within 1 horsepower to 30 horsepower, you can just live with 3 SKUs instead of 30 different SKUs.
David Roberts
I remember reading this book, now how much it got my sort of imagination going. But you know, you can just imagine like you just buy four of these tires with motors in them and you literally can like anyone can design an EV in their garage. You know what I mean? Like this moves most of the complexity into this modular format where everything else is just like Legos, you know. I just feel like it's going to open up an incredible amount of innovation once these things are ubiquitous, you know, once these things are out there.
Ankit Somani
Funny you said that there is. Since we publicly came out a month and a half ago, at least 10% of people who are reaching out are exactly those folks who are making things in their garage. They're making very interesting three-wheel, four-wheel, six-wheel concepts.
David Roberts
Yeah.
Ankit Somani
And so many of them want to upgrade it with just, "Hey, all I need is a wheel. I already have a 72-volt battery pack. I'm going to make it run."
David Roberts
Awesome. Okay, well, let's talk about the manufacturing bit. So, one of the things I read in your materials is that conventional manufacturing is tooled, heavily tooled, and you are working toward a no-tool, software-driven process. But I don't really know what that means. What does that mean? Tooled and not tooled?
Ankit Somani
Very good question. So, typically, how people have done manufacturing is they make a line, a manufacturing line, and they say, "Well, this manufacturing line, let's say, has 100,000 units per year capacity," and they invest in a bunch of machines that are tailor-built for the kind of product you're going to make on that line. So, let's say you're making a 20 horsepower motor. There's a bunch of machines on that line which are "tools" as well that are tailored to that size of the motor that you're building.
David Roberts
And cannot be used to make a 40-horsepower motor.
Ankit Somani
Exactly. They cannot be used. So, what happens in a setup like that is almost never day one, you'll see that capacity. You'd start with, let's say, 10% capacity that's being used or demand that matches that capacity. And then slowly you'll grow. And not only your ROI for the investment that you put in is going to take much longer, you also have these tools that are specific to that motor that also break down and there's less fungibility around it.
David Roberts
Fewer manufacturers of those tools, presumably fewer people who can fix them, etcetera.
Ankit Somani
Correct. Super long lead time. Because it's almost like they're artisan products. These are not large-scale products. There are like 10 people in the world or, five companies in the world who do that and they are in demand, then you are lowest in the run. So our vision was we focused right now on 1 to 30 horsepower motors. And our vision was if we can make a manufacturing process such that on the same line, the exact same line, we can make a 1 horsepower motor, 10 horsepower motor, 30 horsepower across the board without changing the tooling based on the size of the motor that we are building, then that opens up the possibility of when you make an investment in a line you can make across multiple applications, you can have your capacity utilization much higher, which means your ROI for the line is much higher, number one.
And number two, when you go from one geography where you had a manufacturing line to another geography, it's almost the same line that you can replicate versus, "Oh, this other geography needs this other kind of motor. So, I need to think about this from scratch."
So, it allows for this repeatable, automated setup that you can take from one territory to another territory and use the local supply chain of that area to be able to bring up manufacturing.
David Roberts
I see. And so, if your line is cranking out 10 horsepower engines and you want to crank out some 30 horsepower engines, you don't have to replace tools, you just fiddle with software, basically.
Ankit Somani
That's right, yeah.
David Roberts
And I sort of wonder, like, this seems obvious, right? Like why wouldn't you do it this way? So why haven't people done it this way? Like why are people building custom tools? If it is possible to build a tool that's agnostic to size, why haven't people been doing that?
Ankit Somani
I find that the best business ideas in the world are ones that seem very obvious on the surface but have lots of complexity behind the scenes. And that's basically, David, what we have here. So, the whole manufacturing process, the design of the stator and the rest of the motor, the way we integrate different parts together, the way we test them, and the testing infrastructure we built around it, all of these areas under one roof have been working towards making sure that such a line can exist. At the end of the day, we are a manufacturing company, so we got to get that right.
And that's often the biggest challenge for hardware companies. So, the team has been just focused on making that as simple as possible by making changes from a design and process standpoint.
David Roberts
And so, you have one of these, you've built one of these, you have a line now that can crank out anywhere from 1 to 30 horsepower engines or, sorry, motors.
Ankit Somani
Yeah, we have a line in place already. The line is doing smaller volume right now because we are still making sure that it can produce at a sufficient scale, getting the integrity and the veracity of it right. And we're going to be scaling up manufacturing. Part of what we are going to do with the funding is scale up manufacturing. That's where a lot of our focus is. Because we have a lot of demand, we need to get supply to the right point.
David Roberts
Yeah. And when you say a lot of demand, is there a particular, as we say, these small motors are in all sorts of things. Is there a particular product category that is banging down your door that is most hungry for these and most ready to go with them?
Ankit Somani
Yeah. On the small mobility front, we find two-wheelers, small delivery vehicles, as well as AG equipment. We see a lot of interest in that space. And then stationary products, we see fans and pumps. There's a lot of interest in that space. And what we are seeing more recently is around industrial automation as well. But certainly the first two.
David Roberts
How much can 30 horsepower do? Like, what is that? You're not going to get a car out of that. That's sort of like a tractor, you know. How big is 30 horsepower?
Ankit Somani
You'd be surprised. With four wheels of 30 horsepower, you can actually get a decent small size car.
David Roberts
Really.
Ankit Somani
It's not going to be a super powerful car, but one that is fairly affordable and right-sized for most folks that I find myself, you know, hanging out with, especially as a city car. But that's not necessarily the focus. If you look at a 20 horsepower or a 30 horsepower engine for that matter, you can easily run, you know, a decent size, or rather a small size tractor on it. You can run lawnmowers on it. You can run a lot of industrial automation, you know, food processing plant conveyor belts, pumps.
David Roberts
So, you're covering the bulk of the, you think, the motor market with 1 to 30. Like, that hits most of the market?
Ankit Somani
That's where most of the commercial volume is. So, there are residential customers as well. But, and that tends to be super high volume as a product. So, think about, you know, the split AC unit that you may have inside your house that's lower than 1 horsepower, where the volumes are super high, but it's a different class of products. And then you have much bigger than 30, 40, 50 horsepower, but their volumes tend to be much lower. It just tends to be a bigger unit.
David Roberts
Right? Yeah. So, is there any plan to build like a, you know, whatever, 30 to 60 horsepower line? Are you just going to be content with the low end of the market for the time being?
Ankit Somani
Now, we are a powertrain-focused company. We will continue to work across all sizes of powertrains, but we got to have the crawl, walk, run. Where we have sufficient demand, as I said, we have to make sure our manufacturing line continues to perform at scale. Customers are happy with that and then we can expand in both directions on the smaller as well as the bigger end.
David Roberts
So if I was going to build modern luxury car, you know, like a Tesla in the sort of Tesla market segment and I wanted comparable performance, what is that horsepower in those motors, in those wheels?
Ankit Somani
Yeah, and Tesla produces many different cars, but think somewhere between 200 to 500 horsepower, and 400-500 horsepower is like a really luxury PLAID type car. And I think 200 horsepower is a sweet spot for a lot of the medium-duty cars that you would find out there.
David Roberts
So, when I say a 200 horsepower car, does that mean four 50 horsepower motors? Like, they're additive.
Ankit Somani
Exactly. And one of the things, you know, we talked about rare-earth free magnets, but our architecture is such that you could swap out the ferrite-based magnets or the iron-based magnets with rare-earth magnets and significantly boost performance in the same system. So it's kind of rare-earth agnostic, where with ferrite we are able to beat power density in the application classes that we are targeting. But with rare-earth, it could be a lot more and we can easily use that to address the higher end of the market.
David Roberts
Oh, so you think when these things do end up in real full size cars, they're probably going to be using the rare earth magnets?
Ankit Somani
Yeah, I think for trucks it's possible it may continue to use ferrite magnets. But my guess is with cars, the kind of performance expectation people have for the larger cars, it may still need — It doesn't have to be rare-earth magnets, it just needs to be stronger magnets than just purely ferrite magnets that are available today. And there are lots of chemistries that people are working on already. For us, that would be a drop-in replacement.
David Roberts
Ah, so chemistries that avoid the rare-earth, avoid the supply chain struggles.
Ankit Somani
That's right.
David Roberts
And this is like, you know, I feel like I asked this once already, but I keep going back to it, which is like the whole world is electrifying. Certainly, the biggest country in the world by population is the fastest electrifying country. And everybody, everywhere you look, is hurtling toward all sorts of cool electrical innovations and electrical widgets, you know, and electrical systems and wires and just like the whole thing. And yet here, 50% of the world's electricity goes through these motors. And like somehow you're the only company who's like taking a go at making them better.
It seems crazy. Like, surely there are people in your wake. Surely this product category is going to get more active soon, don't you think?
Ankit Somani
Yep. The stationary world, which is where, you know, the statistic of 50% of the world's energy is passing through it, which is all the way from, you know, commercial HVAC to food processing plants, to pumping to residential applications. There have been lots of incremental innovations that have happened over the past, even like the last 20, 30 years. One of the biggest challenges that happens when new innovations appear is they tend to be lab projects and the manufacturability has not been 100% solved or that becomes an afterthought. And in some cases, technologies are mature, but they are still very heavily dependent on rare-earth.
So, while they have pushed things forward, there is a high dependency. So, it's not that we're not claiming we are the only electric motor innovation out there. And in fact, I don't want that to be the case because if the entire world needs to move forward, it can't be dependent on just one innovation alone. There needs to be many different innovations for different sorts of applications. It's just that we have focused on material design, which is performance and manufacturing process together because we think the combo is needed to make something significantly forward.
David Roberts
Yeah, the manufacturability thing is really key. Over the years, I've come to pay a lot more attention to that, you know, because like if you're looking into lithium-ion batteries and you're trying to explain why they have such a lock on that category, it's partially chemistry, but mostly it's just they've manufactured the hell out of them for a lot of years and gotten really good at it. Like that alone is blocking a lot of other products out of that category. Just the manufacturing has been honed so well. So, I have come to take that a lot more seriously.
One more question about the limits of these things. You know, there's a lot of debate about electrifying larger transport. You know, there's a lot of debate about how far electricity can go or whether you're going to eventually need some sort of combustible fuel, you know, in ships, airplanes, etc. You know, and most of that discussion has focused on the battery side of things. Like, can you get enough energy and power density into a battery to run a plane? But it occurs to me that like the motors are the other half of that story.
Like they're the, you know, like they're the yin to the batteries' yang. Are there improvements in electric motors, do you think, on the horizon sufficient that they could move up and start moving bigger things like planes?
Ankit Somani
Yep.
David Roberts
Are these going to help crack, you know, if you can make motors good enough, are they going to help crack some of these hard to decarbonize sectors?
Ankit Somani
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, hidden within your question are two aspects: when you say bigger, sometimes that just means more kilowatts, like can you make megawatt size motors or can you make tens of megawatt size motors? Like there's that. And then there is the power density part of it. Because imagine a plane, well, you don't want to carry a lot more load. Every kilogram extra that the motor has is a kilogram of load that you are not able to carry in some sense. So I think both of those elements, I see a lot of innovations that I see in the market.
But the fundamental problem there, I think, right now, is less the innovation. It's the state of that market where there isn't enough things in production. And if you are a component manufacturer and you're supplying to a company where not enough things have gone into production, then you're sort of beholden by when the market will arrive, when will a consumer adopt. First, that company needs to be in business and then you need to be in business. And that's the reason why we had the opportunity, in fact, to make for a bunch of eVTOL companies, make a high-density motor, and we believe in that.
But just the market right now is not there. And so, just as a competent manufacturer.
David Roberts
There's just not enough demand to sort of justify scaled manufacturing, basically.
Ankit Somani
That's right.
David Roberts
It's kind of a chicken and egg thing there, though. But I guess you need some policy.
Ankit Somani
I'll also say that personally, I'm not an electrification purist per se, so I'll explain what that means.
David Roberts
Oh, I know this is a long-running debate here on Volts.
Ankit Somani
It's okay to think of hybrid as an option to begin with when you start using what's possible, what is at some level of scale. And scale is important for reducing cost also because just because you manufacture something, but your ticket on that eVTOL is going to cost you $2,000 to go from San Jose to San Francisco. Nobody's going to pay that. So, what is the right combination even from a hybrid standpoint? That, by the way, applies equally to cars where there's a certain class of cars, where hybrid makes a ton of sense for the market. It's okay to start there and then use that to seed to do something bigger and better and just completely electric when that opportunity exists.
David Roberts
Yeah, I guess I would just say I'm a big believer in the power of human ingenuity. And I just sort of think that once we start down this, like we're going to be learning along the way, learning and learning, getting a little better and then we'll do more and then we'll learn more and like, you know, I think eventually on some glorious time horizon we're going to get to all electric. Of course, the big question is when. But as you say, there's like plenty of room to get started. So just to review, the sort of innovations here are going to axial flux from radial flux, switching out the magnets, using iron, cheap, abundant iron-based magnets rather than rare-earth magnets, and manufacturing agnosticism, I guess you would say, or software-driven manufacturing process.
Are there, if we look in the future, fundamental advances still to be had in this space? Or is this one of those things where like electric motors have been around long enough that we're sort of like squeezing out efficiencies at the margins? Do you know what I mean? Like are there big advances still to be had?
Ankit Somani
Well, three years ago, people didn't think so, and then the team here was able to put together some innovation to be able to get some major changes. So, I'm absolutely a believer that advances in this space will continue to come. Part of what we want to do is, you know, the top 10 universities in the world, even in the US, they didn't even have an electric motors focused program. So, if we start showing to the world that "Hey, businesses in this area are possible, they can be big, they can exist, and advances are needed." Hopefully, there's more focus, just like the battery world.
Hopefully, there's more talent that comes around it, and that leads to more ideas. So, I would hate to say this is the last, last big innovation. I would love to see a lot more happen here. Ultimately, it's just about at the simplest level, it's the highest amount of magnetic flux that you can generate with the least amount of material. And the simplest way to place that material in the right spot that can help you use different kinds of magnet chemistries on top of it to be able to meet application-specific demands. So, I think there's a lot of opportunity in this space, and hopefully, we continue to out-innovate ourselves if possible.
David Roberts
All right, sounds good. Well, this is really cool. One of the fun things about this job is just, I discover whole new areas of interesting people doing interesting work that I didn't even know existed. So this is very, very fascinating. Just to dive into the motor question and now it's like, you know, now I'm like motor-pilled. I look around, I'm seeing them everywhere I look. I'm like, "Oh yeah, there's another one." So thanks for walking us through this and thanks for your work on this.
Ankit Somani
Thank you so much. David, thanks for the opportunity to talk with you and share something with your listeners today.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially, to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.
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