Vimag Labs raised $5M from Accel to build motors with no rare-earth magnets

Integrated motion systems — motors, controllers and embedded software — sold as complete solutions across EV and industrial segments

Motors can match permanent-magnet performance with zero rare earths: copper, steel, power electronics and real-time control generating 'virtual magnets' in software

$5M Series A led by Accel, raised after roughly four years of self-funded platform building

Automotive engineer Manish Seth had spent his career inside large OEM programmes across India, Europe and North America. By 2020 he saw electrification making batteries and motors choke points — and everyone funding batteries, nobody motors. He launched Volectra that year to build motors and control systems, initially following the industry's permanent-magnet norms.

When Covid disrupted rare-earth supply, Seth rethought the architecture entirely: magnets exist to create fields, so fields could be generated dynamically instead. By 2023 the technology was mature enough to spin out Vimag Labs as a dedicated company. Inside its motors, rare-earth magnets give way to copper, silicon steel, proprietary power electronics and real-time algorithms that transfer energy wirelessly to the rotor, with software sensors inferring rotor position and torque on edge hardware — no cloud connection required.

More than 80% of rare-earth processing sits in China, making every EV and robot motor a geopolitical exposure

Motors were treated as a solved problem for decades, leaving architectural innovation unfunded

Software-defined motors keep improving after deployment — OTA updates replace hardware redesigns

Standard inputs (steel, copper, electronics) decouple production schedules from mineral markets

When a component's supply chain is the vulnerability, don't source around it — redesign the physics so the constrained material has no role at all.

As of February 2026 Vimag was preparing production deployments across EV categories starting with India, running industrial pilots in parallel, and planned to bring products to market, expand Indian manufacturing capacity and deepen global deployments over the following 12 to 18 months.