I'm grateful to share that we've raised an $11.5M seed, led by amazing folks at Greycroft and Also Capital @nunzi46 . The team has moved at a blistering pace over the last 5 months, and I’m excited to share more with the world on where we see this going.
Introducing Atlas We're building motion systems for drones, robots, and autonomous machines. Our work is in service of our customers who work factory floors, tend farmland, move medicine, and defend our country. Atlas is built to supply them quickly, and supply them in volume. Their progress should no longer be held back by a motor or actuator.
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Best engineering team in the world.
Great time speaking with Danny at the Strativ group kicking off his new podcast! Take a listen, full podcast linked in the comments! @atlasmotion
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Christian Mochen retweeted
Simulation tools without tested designs that it produced to anchor it are just pretty picture making tools. Estimate the Limit. Test beyond the Limit. Know the limit. @atlasmotion
Atlas Testing
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A little insight into how we engineer at Atlas
Atlas Testing
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Christian Mochen retweeted
Atlas Testing
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Maniacal urgency.
The fellas at @MorganStanley are officially actuator pilled: “To give investors a sense of scale for the opportunity (globally here, not just the US), we proxy the actuator opportunity as motors + bearings + reducers, sizing the 2030 global TAM at $94bn in our base case...”
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Christian Mochen retweeted
To add to Chris, the key here is you don’t want to be in a game of just selling hardware that’s better than somebody else’s. You want to either sell an outcome at scale (Chris’s point) or remove labor at scale. If you have the ability to produce hardware at scale and do it quicker/cheaper through automation, that also becomes hard to compete away in the long run
Longer truth nuke: Hardware investing isn't a refuge from software commodification. There's no defensibility in most hardware. What's more, the way venture describes hardware as "cheaper, faster, at scale" is actually describing a race to the bottom that strips value from OEMs. Sure, you can sell a lot of picks for a low cost and high demand and print. And you look up market and see most buyers are low profitability organizations, so you figure picks are the place to be. Strip back the layers and realize how much physical labor costs, and that every competitor pays the same for it. The second you build a mining robot you have a choice though: sell it and stay in the (fancy) pick business, which is a race to the bottom, or run it yourself and now you're the labor. The labor budget on any job is a multiple of the tool budget. And a pick gets priced against the next pick, while labor gets priced against the humans it replaces, with the cost of the robot doing it being the thing that's collapsing. It was only ever a bad business because it was made of people. There's a brief moment in time right now where robotics has not yet been adopted at scale outside the factory, and broadly replacing physical labor is going to be a generational shift in how business gets done. That means there is a window in nearly every industry to eat up incumbents by doing the work they do today with robotics. It's ultimately a labor arbitrage. Incumbents have little way to combat it until they can buy a platform AND orchestrate it, and right now they can't because it doesn't exist in the market, so you have to build it yourself. And then figure out how to drive value with it. But hardware commodifies, then orchestration commodifies, and ultimately the only thing that doesn't is owning outcomes: the contract, the liability, and the record of every job you've ever run on a customer's assets. A competitor can match your robots on day one but there's no way to buy ten years of history. If you can replace full workflows with robotics and own that outcome, each additional workflow you can complete compounds your gravity. You start looking a lot like a labor force, which alongside energy and capital are the three fundamental forces of getting anything done. You essentially become infrastructure for the physical world.
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the truth. we accepted this as absolute when we founded Atlas. hardware is the wedge, not the end state.
Longer truth nuke: Hardware investing isn't a refuge from software commodification. There's no defensibility in most hardware. What's more, the way venture describes hardware as "cheaper, faster, at scale" is actually describing a race to the bottom that strips value from OEMs. Sure, you can sell a lot of picks for a low cost and high demand and print. And you look up market and see most buyers are low profitability organizations, so you figure picks are the place to be. Strip back the layers and realize how much physical labor costs, and that every competitor pays the same for it. The second you build a mining robot you have a choice though: sell it and stay in the (fancy) pick business, which is a race to the bottom, or run it yourself and now you're the labor. The labor budget on any job is a multiple of the tool budget. And a pick gets priced against the next pick, while labor gets priced against the humans it replaces, with the cost of the robot doing it being the thing that's collapsing. It was only ever a bad business because it was made of people. There's a brief moment in time right now where robotics has not yet been adopted at scale outside the factory, and broadly replacing physical labor is going to be a generational shift in how business gets done. That means there is a window in nearly every industry to eat up incumbents by doing the work they do today with robotics. It's ultimately a labor arbitrage. Incumbents have little way to combat it until they can buy a platform AND orchestrate it, and right now they can't because it doesn't exist in the market, so you have to build it yourself. And then figure out how to drive value with it. But hardware commodifies, then orchestration commodifies, and ultimately the only thing that doesn't is owning outcomes: the contract, the liability, and the record of every job you've ever run on a customer's assets. A competitor can match your robots on day one but there's no way to buy ten years of history. If you can replace full workflows with robotics and own that outcome, each additional workflow you can complete compounds your gravity. You start looking a lot like a labor force, which alongside energy and capital are the three fundamental forces of getting anything done. You essentially become infrastructure for the physical world.
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The best companies in robotics aren’t all built in one place. So we’re going to them. See you on the road.
Atlas World Tour We are hitting the road to spend time with our partners who are building the future of robotics and autonomy, in the places they call home. Our stops are below. If you’re in or around one of these cities, reply or DM us. We’d love to meet you.
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Moar happy customers
Stoked to have the @atlasmotion motors in hand! The bell design fits our drone design language so well, it looks sharp. Excited to have our team get these guys in the air and on the dyno.
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Christian Mochen retweeted
Stoked to have the @atlasmotion motors in hand! The bell design fits our drone design language so well, it looks sharp. Excited to have our team get these guys in the air and on the dyno.
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Christian Mochen retweeted
Love to see customers with motors! @YukonK9 thanks for the kind words, the structure of the bell is the Atlas "A". Stoked for the dyno tests!
Stoked to have the @atlasmotion motors in hand! The bell design fits our drone design language so well, it looks sharp. Excited to have our team get these guys in the air and on the dyno.
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NYC next week, come find me if you’re out there!
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nothing better than design reviews at midnight—more motors incoming.
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Christian Mochen retweeted
Following a hunch to say “no” to millions of dollars so you can move across continents to a place you’ve never lived, to build for customers you’ve never met, while ignoring the VC consensus is an insane move But nobody says fortune favors the meek
Ed is a killer! He walked away from an 8-figure acquisition at his last company rather than block liquidity for his team, then used his own savings to fund Exosat’s first launch contract. Now he’s building sovereign satellite infrastructure. Huge vision. Real sacrifice. Real skin in the game. Excited to back Ed and Exosat.
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"To have ultimate victory, you must be ruthless." — Napoleon Bonaparte
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beat it to shit.
Test data incoming.
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RT @tombaron: Hire your uncles Mike, Bryce, and I have known each other a while but we really got close in Ukraine and especially while I…
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Christian Mochen retweeted
The brushless motor is to the modern drone battlefield what the horse was during the Civil War. A ubiquitous propulsion system providing distinct advantages for reconnaissance and attack. 🐎
Introducing the Atlas 2207, the newest addition to our Standard Motor Series, designed for compact applications. 1750 kV. 35 g. 6S. Class H. Available to order now.
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The 2207 might be one of the most versatile motor form factors in small autonomous systems. It became ubiquitous through FPV because it sits at a useful intersection of power density, responsiveness, weight, and cost. The same characteristics that make it great for racing drones translate directly into much broader applications. The obvious use case is propulsion for small, high-performance UAVs. But 2207-class motors are increasingly useful anywhere you need high RPM, fast transient response, and meaningful power from a package weighing only a few dozen grams. That opens up applications in compact blowers and pumps, reaction wheels, small robotic joints, high-speed mechanisms, test equipment, and auxiliary actuation. FPV created enormous demand for this motor class and autonomy is expanding the design space for it.
Introducing the Atlas 2207, the newest addition to our Standard Motor Series, designed for compact applications. 1750 kV. 35 g. 6S. Class H. Available to order now.
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