Westmag, the American manufacturer of drone motors and robot actuators, emerged from stealth today with $11 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Founders Fund, Lux Capital, NFDG, Menlo Ventures, and other top investors.
Westmag, short for Western Magnetics Company, closed this $11M in funding in 2025. Since then, the company has been building industrial capacity, securing critical suppliers, and validating its motors and actuators by partnering with high-volume customers. Now, the company is rapidly ramping production at Factory 01, its launch manufacturing facility and headquarters in South San Francisco, to fulfill its current book of committed customer orders for hundreds of thousands of units.
Aerial drones fly using 4+ electric motors. Robots move using many actuators with embedded electric motors – 20+ in the case of humanoids. China has held the vast majority of global drone motor and robot actuator component production for decades.
“Most of the hardware, especially the motors and actuators that actually bring motion to physical AI, has been built outside of the U.S. But it doesn’t have to be this way,” said David Hansen, Co-Founder and CEO of Westmag. “Westmag is aggregating the rising demand to quickly scale production capacity and become the trusted supplier of high performance, cost effective motors and actuators.”
As the American drone and robot industries now rapidly grow in scale and importance, this dependency presents acute challenges in supply chain resilience and bottlenecks the pace of innovation. Recognizing this issue, in December 2025 the Federal Communications Commission effectively banned the sale of new models of foreign-made drones and critical components, including motors.
Across drones, humanoids, quadrupeds, and other mobile robots, total demand for high-performance motors and actuators over the next five years is orders of magnitude higher than the domestic industry has ever served. Westmag is alone today in building the high volume, low cost capacity that American robot and drone OEMs need to win globally.
Westmag is onshoring production and scaling by vertically integrating design, manufacturing, and supply chain. Since motors and actuators are composed of many common materials and production processes, Westmag is designing and building both on a shared architecture. At Factory 01 in South San Francisco, Westmag designs, automatically winds, assembles, and validates every motor and actuator on its integrated production platform. With flexible automation and replicable production modules, Westmag can scale these common building blocks with high SKU mix and high volumes to serve a wide variety of customers and applications.
The company is building its supply chain with key suppliers in the U.S. and allied countries, such as Japan, where the company already has several close partners. Westmag is investing upstream in heavy industrial capacity for subcomponent production, such as electromagnet stator steel stamping and rare earth magnet finishing capacity, to drive cost engineering and greater control throughout the entire bill of materials.
“Western drone and robot companies should benefit from the compounding advantages of reliable, cost effective domestic component supply,” said Jordan Sanders, Co-Founder and COO of Westmag. “That’s why we’re building Westmag to be the great American motor company serving the global market.”
Westmag has prioritized its initial product development by partnering directly with select high-volume customers for supply offtake agreements to quickly build and ramp industrial capacity. The company will leverage this foundation to roll out an increasingly wide range of standardized motor and actuator products that lower-volume customers can easily access and build upon. Westmag has chosen to build and scale production in the Bay Area to be close to the top customers, capital, and engineering talent required to scale quickly.
“Motors and actuators are the muscle of physical AI, and right now America’s share of that muscle is essentially zero,” said Erin Price-Wright, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Without a domestic industry, every American drone company, every robotics company and every defense prime is building on a foundation they do not control. David and Jordan understand that the win condition is not a marginally better motor. It is the ability to make a lot of them, here, on a platform that serves both drones and robots.”
Westmag is hiring across all functions, including manufacturing, supply chain, design engineering, automation, sales, and operations at its South San Francisco headquarters.
About Westmag
Westmag, short for Western Magnetics Company, is the American manufacturer of drone motors and robot actuators. The company designs and manufactures its products in South San Francisco, committed to building and scaling in the U.S. to serve the global market. Westmag is ramping production to serve leading drone and robot companies with millions of motors and actuators. Westmag is headquartered in South San Francisco and is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, NFDG, Menlo Ventures, and other top investors. For more information, visit westmag.com.
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