Modal Motors aims to break China’s monopoly with electric motors for walkers and robots that use no rare magnets

Efforts to reshore heavy industry and hard technologies in the United States are accelerating, especially in the drone and robotics sectors, but these attempts encounter a structural barrier: China’s near-absolute control over the supply chains for rare-earth element magnets. In this context, Modal Motors, led by founder Michael Van Stenberg, emerges with a vision to completely exclude China from electric motor manufacturing by fundamentally abandoning the use of rare-earth magnets in motor designs.

Van Stenberg, who spent the past decade manufacturing various electric motors in North America, believes the current reshoring wave suffers from a fundamental flaw. Companies that claim to move production to the U.S. essentially copy Chinese motor designs and reassemble them locally, while continuing to rely entirely on imported magnets, hoping that the U.S. rare-earth extraction and processing system will mature quickly. However, this hope, in his assessment, collides with a reality that requires many years before domestic alternatives can replace Chinese supplies, especially after Beijing has spent a quarter-century acquiring mining rights and mines worldwide to cement its monopoly.

The startup is preparing to compete in the “Startup Battlefield 200” contest at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, presenting two prototype motors. The first model is a compact electric motor for drones that can also be used in fans, blowers, and mechanical actuators, designed to reduce weight while delivering the highest possible torque density and operational efficiency. The second, more radical model is the Hybrid Enigma Drive, a flat motor suited to limited vertical spaces and low-profile applications, leveraging the founder’s decades-long automotive experience, including his work in the late-1990s on hybrid powertrains for a Chinese car project.

Industrial sovereignty is achieved not by moving assembly lines, but by redesigning physical components to bypass geopolitical bottlenecks.

This shift has a direct strategic implication for advanced-tech sectors in the Gulf, Egypt, and the region at large. As regional bets on domestic manufacturing and assembly of autonomous systems, such as delivery drones, logistics robots, and space applications, intensify, procurement and development teams often focus on diversifying suppliers and contracting Western firms to safeguard supply chains. Yet Modal Motors’ experience shows that a motor built in the West remains vulnerable to Chinese export bans if its magnetic core relies on Beijing-controlled rare-earth elements. This reality compels engineering leadership and supply managers in regional companies to revisit hardware specifications, moving from country-of-origin checks to assessments of the physical design architecture, and to ensure motors are free of critical choke-point metals.

Eliminating rare-earth elements constitutes a real test of the viability of building robust hard technologies; reliance on a single supplier remains a security and operational vulnerability that threatens production plans, whether in American factories or in startups aiming to localize robotics and smart-system manufacturing in the region.