Atlas Motion emerges from stealth with $11.5M seed to build Western drone motor supply chain

Speaker 1: Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. I think we've got ourselves a few question for every guest. Our next guest is Christian Mochen from Atlas Motion. Fantastic Atlas Motion. That's a great name. Research in Mochen. How you doing,

Speaker 3: Christian? I appreciate it, fellas.

Speaker 1: Good to meet you. What's happening? Great

Speaker 2: name. I'm excited already.

Speaker 3: I should have gotten since the first time I'm

Speaker 1: pleased to introduce yourself in the company. What what's name?

Speaker 2: He named the company almost after himself. Oh. Is that how to pronounce your

Speaker 5: last Yeah.

Speaker 3: Christian Motion.

Speaker 1: Motion.

Speaker 2: Wow. Elite. Pretty good. Destined for greatness.

Speaker 1: This is great. Okay. Anyway, sorry. Jump right into it. Kick us off with an introduction on yourself, the company. Tell us about it.

Speaker 3: Yeah, man. Today's a big day for us. We're we're coming out of stealth announcing an $11,500,000 seed round led by Graycroft and Austin

Speaker 1: Capital. Graycroft?

Speaker 3: Yeah. Great team. Great team. And we're building the motion system stack for autonomous systems and robotic platforms for the West.

Speaker 4: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: What does that what does that actually mean? Small drone motors like like the actuators, there's so many different pieces at every Yeah. Different scale. Do you want to have a beachhead in a particular part and then grow from there? Or do you want to create a flexible system that can do, you know, basically like a helicopter motor all the way down to like a little quadcopter motor or, you know, slice it up? What do you think?

Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, the macro is anything that moves. But of course, the wedge right now is going to be small drone motors.

Speaker 1: That's Okay.

Speaker 3: That's what we're currently scaling production for right now.

Speaker 1: That's amazing.

Speaker 4: And then

Speaker 3: moving into complex actuating systems like your quasi direct drives.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 3: Things like that.

Speaker 1: There was a small drone motor manufacturer in America. I believe in Washington. It was bought by private equity maybe like eight years ago or something and everything no. You're going to be you're going be booing in a second because everything was moved offshore. And I was always thinking about would there be an opportunity to buy that asset and reshore things or use more of a search fund private equity style model. And I'm wondering if you ever grappled with that as you were thinking about starting the company. Like how much Yeah. Would you want to start from scratch versus build on the shoulders of giants in terms of intellectual property or acquiring an existing manufacturer?

Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, we we certainly did think about those approaches. Mhmm. Right now for us, it's not really an onshore versus offshore problem.

Speaker 4: Sure.

Speaker 3: I mean, the the the greater the greater scope of the problem requires that I mean, it's a cost competitive industry, right? Yeah. To be globally competitive, you're going to be competing on unit economics all the way through to your end state customer.

Speaker 4: Mhmm.

Speaker 3: So for us, we wanted to be very pragmatic in how we set up the operation. Mhmm. And that meant two things. One, leverage software based operations, and set up in a place that has very, very dense process knowledge that we could harness, automate, strip away all the blow, and then bring back to America. So a large part of our operations are based out of The Philippines and Manila.

Speaker 5: Sure.

Speaker 3: Southeast Asia is a is a manufacturing hub for these type of components. I mean, lot of our engineers out there come from places like Dyson where they were outputting hundreds of thousands of motors a week. Mhmm. And obviously, like, we'd want to have that process knowledge here in America, but it largely doesn't exist right now. So we're we're going to build out that industrial infrastructure base, automate where we can, and then bring it to America where we can actually, you know, produce in a cost competitive manner.

Speaker 1: Last question. You already have revenue. That's incredibly quick. What's the shape of the customer base? Who's who's actually buying? Is it is it full on enterprises that are shipping millions of units? Or is it smaller companies that are still in, like, the r and d phase and they just want to experiment quickly?

Speaker 3: Yeah. It's a mix of both. So for us, we wanted to take a pretty unique approach into how we attack this. So typically, when you deal with a tier one supplier in this space, they're largely forced to operate off of a SKU based model. Right? The effective cost of downstream iteration is far too high Mhmm. To inherent high variability and high flexibility and change for for your customer base. What we're doing is we're driving the effective cost of iteration as close to zero as possible, and we're doing that leveraging internal software systems to actually co design the motor platforms that we build and inject it across our manufacturing operations. And then we standardize all our raw material inputs to actually make that changeover process pretty simple.

Speaker 1: Very cool.

Speaker 4: What were

Speaker 3: you doing before customer base Yeah. I was yeah. Yeah. I started my career at Toyota, then I went over to Tesla, helped launch the Gigafactory Texas location.

Speaker 1: Very cool.

Speaker 3: And then the back end of my stint before starting this, I I spent in defense tech at Shield AI and then Mochen Industries.

Speaker 1: Wow. Wow. Yeah. It's quite the race.

Speaker 2: Crazy run.

Speaker 1: Well, congratulations and thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah. Great to

Speaker 4: meet you.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Thanks, guys. I appreciate

Speaker 1: you this goes and I'm sure we'll have you back

Speaker 2: on Looking forward to the bee. Yeah. I know it'll be soon.

Speaker 4: We'll talk to you later.

Speaker 1: Have a

Speaker 4: good one. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell

Speaker 1: you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows through business that lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And we have a very special guest next. He was he was caught photographed by some paparazzi. I saw it on Getty Images.