Building the Great American Motor Company: Our Investment in Westmag

The autonomous machine revolution is no longer a forecast. Drones are surveilling borders, delivering cargo, and flying combat missions. Humanoid robots are entering warehouses and factory floors, and quadrupeds are inspecting pipelines and disaster zones. Every one of these machines moves because of motors.

For decades, nearly all of those motors have been built overseas. China manufactures more than 30M more drone motors and robot actuators every year than the U.S. does. For American and other global companies building drones, humanoids, and mobile robots, that dependency isn't just a supply chain inconvenience, it's a structural vulnerability.

That is why we are excited to announce Outset's investment in Westmag.

The missing layer in the autonomous machine stack

Motors are commodity hardware: high-volume, cost-sensitive, and present in virtually every machine that moves through the physical world. A drone has four, a robot actuator has a motor at its core, and a humanoid has thirty or more. That ubiquity is exactly what makes domestic supply so consequential and its absence so limiting.

The problem isn't that engineers can't design great motors. The problem is that no one has built the domestic manufacturing infrastructure to produce them at the volumes and cost points the market requires. OEMs today are stuck choosing between a supply chain they can't see into and a domestic alternative that can't yet meet their scale. That tradeoff has been the reality for years; however, the demand is no longer patient. The autonomous machine decade is here, and it arrived faster than domestic supply ever prepared for.

A large and urgent market

Demand for high-performance motors and actuators across drones, humanoids, quadrupeds, and mobile robots will exceed what the domestic industry has ever produced by orders of magnitude over the next few years. Group 1, 2, and 3 UAS platforms alone represent an enormous and growing volume need. You add the humanoid and quadruped markets, each scaling rapidly, and the addressable opportunity becomes one of the largest manufacturing buildouts in recent memory.

The policy environment has sharpened the urgency further. When the FCC moved in December 2025 to restrict the sale of new foreign-made drones and critical components, including motors, it confirmed what drone and robotics OEMs had already been saying privately for years. The demand for a reliable domestic supplier is both immediate and accelerating.

Enter Westmag

Westmag is building the vertically integrated American motor company: they’re designing, manufacturing, and scaling drone motors and robot actuators from a single integrated platform in South San Francisco.

The team designs motors and actuators on a shared architecture, then winds, assembles, and validates them on an integrated production line built around flexible automation and replicable modules. The shared architecture matters, so every engineering investment, manufacturing process, and supply chain relationship compounds across both product lines.

Westmag is already shipping against a committed book of orders for hundreds of thousands of units. The roadmap targets annual capacity of more than 30M units before 2030. To get there, the team is investing upstream: in stator steel stamping, rare-earth magnet finishing, and other subcomponent production; to drive cost engineering and deepen control across the full bill of materials. The supply chain is NDAA-compliant by design, anchored in U.S. and allied sourcing, and includes close partnerships already established in Japan.

Westmag was founded by David Hansen (CEO) and Jordan Sanders (COO), who bring together product, operations, and scale-manufacturing expertise. The broader team draws from Waterloo, UBC, MIT, and Cornell, amongst others.

The founding conviction is simple and sharp: America has never built this category at scale, and that gap is opening exactly when the demand for it is exploding.

Why we invested

At Outset, we back deep technology companies addressing large, enduring markets led by founders who understand both the engineering and the system they're operating within. Westmag sits at the intersection of advanced manufacturing, national security, and the autonomous machine stack: a critical input to multiple trillion-dollar industries, with no credible domestic supplier at scale.

Outset is proud to back Westmag as they build the motor and actuator infrastructure that drones and robots will run on for decades to come.