America Spins on Westmag
Brief
Westmag (Western Magnetics Company) is building a vertically integrated U.S. supply chain for brushless DC motors and actuators with the explicit aim of serving the nascent American drone and robotics industries. Co‑founded by David Hansen and Jordan Sanders and incorporated November 29, 2024, Westmag raised an $11M seed round in August 2025 from investors including a16z, Founders Fund and Lux to expand Bay Area production capacity. The company’s thesis is industrial rather than purely technical: motors are materially simple (electrical steel, copper, neodymium magnets) but manufacturing‑intensive — lamination stamping and stacking, precise hair‑thin copper winding under controlled tension, magnet shaping and magnetizing to fractions‑of‑a‑degree orientation, rotor balancing and bearing fits — and China’s decades of volume produced a compounding library of process knowledge that Westmag intends to rebuild in the West.
Westmag’s go‑to‑market and factory strategy is explicitly horizontal-plus‑vertical: aggregate fragmented demand from many U.S. drone and robotics startups, secure high‑volume offtakes (the company reports signing offtake agreements for hundreds of thousands of motors), and invest upstream where necessary — stamping/powder‑coating stators domestically (electrical steel sourced from Japan/allies), and creating domestic capacity to cut, coat and magnetize NdFeB magnet blocks rather than sending slabs to Malaysia/China and back. The business got an urgent tailwind after OFAC sanctioned T‑Motor on January 15, 2025 and the FCC put UAS foreign components on its Covered List in December 2025, prompting dual‑sourcing and a Red‑White‑and‑Blue premium from defense and federal demand. Westmag plans to move from initially matching current Asian designs to designing for manufacturing and automation (die‑stamping, near‑net‑shape parts, conveyors instead of couriers) to compress iteration cycles from months to days, chase scale economies, and become the “TSMC‑like” fab for motors and actuators — enabling faster product iteration for American drone and robotics firms while working toward cost parity at high volume.
Why it matters
Westmag (Western Magnetics Company) was incorporated on November 29, 2024 by co‑founders David Hansen and Jordan Sanders and is headquartered in South San Francisco, aiming to manufacture brushless DC motors and actuators in the U.S.
Key details
- The company raised an $11 million Seed round in August 2025 from a16z, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, NFDG, Menlo Ventures and angels (including Jim Belosic, Sam D’Amico, and Packy McCormick) to scale production and upstream integration.
- Regulatory and geopolitical shocks accelerated demand: OFAC sanctioned T‑Motor on January 15, 2025 (linked to >$9M in shipments to Russian entities), and the FCC added UAS and UAS critical foreign components to its Covered List in December 2025, pushing U.S. customers to dual‑source domestic suppliers.
- Westmag’s operational strategy is vertical integration: stamp and powder‑coat stators from electrical steel sourced from allied countries (Japan cited), and pursue cutting/coating/magnetizing neodymium magnet blocks domestically to eliminate overseas tooling/time bottlenecks.
- Technical constraints: Westmag emphasizes process control over novel materials — BLDC motors require precise lamination stacking, hair‑thin copper winding tension, magnet orientation to fractions of a degree, and magnetizing fixtures that fire large current bursts; efficiency gains are incremental (e.g., 89%→91%).
- Demand tailwinds and TAM estimates: each drone uses 4 motors (BofA cites Ukraine needing ~28 million motors for 7M drones in one year); humanoid robots require ~20–40 actuators each, with estimates of 10 million robots in a decade and ~3 billion by 2060, implying actuator demand in the tens to low hundreds of billions.