Modal Motors Builds Electric Motors With Zero Rare-Earth Magnets

Modal Motors is developing electric motors that contain no rare-earth magnets at all — a design choice founder Michael Van Steenburg says is the only real way to cut China out of the U.S. motor supply chain.

Van Steenburg has spent the last decade building electric motors in the U.S. and North America. With his new startup, he wants to repeat the feat while ditching rare-earth magnets entirely, separating American manufacturing from China's grip on those materials. Modal Motors is one of the founders in the Startup Battlefield 200, the cohort that will compete at TechCrunch Disrupt next month.

The pitch is urgent, he argues, because China has already demonstrated its willingness to weaponize the supply.

"China's already flexed its muscles a couple times," Van Steenburg said, referring to the country restricting access to rare-earth products.

Other companies are working to set up electric motor manufacturing and supply chains in the U.S. But Van Steenburg argues they are taking the wrong approach by continuing to rely on rare-earth magnets. Domestic supply of those materials remains years away, he said.

"Other people are 'reshoring,' [but] they're basically knocking off Chinese motors and just doing it in the U.S. But they're hoping that the U.S. rare-earth magnet system is going to get up to speed fast enough," he said. "It's going to still be a while longer before they can actually replace China."

Modal Motors has two products in development ahead of Disrupt. The first is a small electric motor built for drones that can also serve in fans, blowers and actuators. According to the startup's website, it is designed to "minimize mass while delivering maximum torque density and efficiency."

The second, more radical design is what Modal calls the "Hybrid Enigma Drive" — a planar, or flat, electric motor built to fit into lower-profile spaces.

Van Steenburg draws on decades of experience in the automotive industry to develop these motors and make them customer-ready. His history with China adds an irony to the current mission. In the late 1990s, he worked on a hybrid gas-electric drivetrain that China wanted to install in its so-called "People's Car."

"It's kind of comical," he said, reflecting on how much the world has changed since that project.

What has not changed, he said, is his outsider streak and his conviction about taking on hard problems. He frames China's dominance of rare earths as a crisis decades in the making.

"I always tell people that the clock started ticking 25 years ago, and in that whole time, I've watched a slow-motion train wreck as China's been going around the world, grabbing mines, grabbing mineral rights, doing all these things, and slowly but surely monopolizing the entire rare-earth supply chain," he said.

With drone and robotics makers under pressure to de-risk their component sourcing, Modal Motors' magnet-free designs — pitched at Disrupt next month — offer a bet that U.S. hard tech can bypass the rare-earth bottleneck rather than wait years for a domestic magnet industry to catch up.