00 rare-earth magnets
No exposure to magnet supply risk
Wirelessly Excited Synchronous Machine
No magnets.
No magnets.
No brushes.
No rare earths.
Kinetiq Drive builds the Wirelessly Excited Synchronous Machine, an electric motor and generator with a contactless rotor and a fully controllable field. The performance you expect, without the magnets, the wear, or the supply risk.
00 brushes or slip rings
Rotor energized without contact
00 separate exciter
Excitation built in, no add-on hardware
01 controllable field
Efficient across the full torque and speed map
The tradeoff
Every electric machine has forced a compromise.
Drivetrain engineers have had three imperfect options. Each one buys a strength by paying for it somewhere else.
Permanent magnet
High density, hard dependency
Strong power density and efficiency, built on rare-earth magnets with volatile pricing and concentrated supply chains.
Pays in: rare-earth supply risk
Induction
Rugged, but lossy
No magnets and famously robust, yet current induced in the rotor turns into heat, so efficiency and density fall behind.
Pays in: rotor losses
Wound field
Controllable, but encumbered
No magnets and a fully adjustable field, but the rotor has always needed brushes and slip rings that wear, or a separate excitation system that adds cost, size, and mass.
Pays in: excitation hardware
→ Kinetiq Drive keeps the strengths and removes the penalty.
The machine
The Wirelessly Excited Synchronous Machine
A synchronous machine that runs with no permanent magnets and energizes its rotor with no physical contact. Nothing demagnetizes, nothing wears at the rotor, and no rare earths sit in the supply chain. It works as a motor or a generator, and the field stays fully under control across the operating range.
Magnet-free
Brushless
No slip rings
Contactless rotor
Controllable field
Rare-earth-free
Motor and generator
How it works
Exciting the rotor without touching it
A wound-field machine needs power on the spinning rotor to create its magnetic poles. Conventionally that means brushes, slip rings, or a separate exciter. The WESM delivers that energy across the air gap, electromagnetically and with no contact, so the rotor carries no magnets and nothing rubs.
-
A controllable field starts in the stationary frame
Excitation is generated in the stator and set electronically, so the source of the rotor's magnetism never has to spin with the machine.
-
Energy crosses the air gap with no contact
That excitation is coupled electromagnetically from the stationary side to the rotor across the same air gap the machine already has, so there are no brushes, no slip rings, and no separate exciter to maintain.
-
The rotor builds its own poles, no magnets needed
The coupled energy drives the rotor's field winding, creating magnetic poles like a wound-field machine, but with no permanent magnets and therefore no rare earths and nothing to demagnetize.
-
Torque is produced, and the field stays under command
The rotor field locks with the rotating stator field to make synchronous torque. Because excitation is electronic, the field can be tuned for efficiency across the speed range, or switched off entirely for inherent fault safety.
Why it matters
What the architecture buys you
Rare-earth-free
No permanent magnets means no exposure to rare-earth pricing or a supply chain concentrated in a single region.
Nothing wears at the rotor
With no brushes and no slip rings, the sliding contacts that drive maintenance on conventional wound-field machines are simply gone.
No excitation hardware
Excitation is built into the machine, so the separate exciter that adds cost, size, and mass to other contactless designs is simply not there.
Field you can control
The rotor field is adjustable, so efficiency can be optimized across the full torque and speed map, with a wide constant-power range at high speed.
Inherent fault safety
The field can be switched off, so there is no uncontrolled back-EMF spinning a faulted machine, a meaningful safety margin in vehicles.
Standard footprint
The architecture is designed to fit standard machine frames, opening a path to adoption without a new mechanical envelope or new tooling.
Side by side
Where it sits against the field
The four mainstream traction architectures, measured on what actually drives cost, reliability, and supply risk.
| Permanent magnet | Induction | Conventional wound field | WESM · Kinetiq | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rare-earth magnets | Required | None | None | None |
| Brushes or slip rings | None | None | Brushes, slip rings, or an added exciter | None |
| Separate excitation hardware | Not applicable | Not applicable | Required | None |
| Field control | Fixed | Limited | Full | Full |
| Power density | High | Moderate | Moderate to high | Moderate to high |
| Rotor maintenance | Low | Low | Higher, contacts wear | Low |
| Fault back-EMF | Always present | None | Controllable | Controllable |
WESM combines the magnet-free, controllable field of a wound-field machine with the contactless, low-maintenance rotor of an induction machine, and removes the excitation hardware that both contactless wound-field approaches require.
The future of the machine
One architecture, many drivetrains
The same principle scales across power levels and runs as a motor or a generator. Wherever magnet supply, maintenance, or field control is a constraint, the WESM has a place.
01 / land
EV and unconventional drivetrains
Passenger and commercial traction without rare-earth exposure, and an open door to new or unconventional vehicle architectures that need magnet-free, controllable drive.
02 / off-highway
Off-highway and heavy propulsion
Construction, agriculture, and mining duty cycles reward machines that are rugged, serviceable, and free of contacts that wear under continuous load.
03 / marine
Ship and marine propulsion
Large propulsion drives where magnet-free construction, low maintenance at sea, and precise field control across the operating range all carry weight.
04 / wind
Wind turbine generators
Run as a generator, the architecture offers rare-earth-free generation for direct-drive and geared turbines, easing the magnet bottleneck that constrains the wind industry.
05 / rail
Rail traction
Continuous-duty machines for rail benefit from full field control and a rotor with no sliding contacts to inspect or replace.
06 / consumer
Consumer and light industrial
High-volume products like outdoor power equipment, power tools, pumps, and appliances, where removing rare-earth magnets cuts cost and supply risk at scale and a brushless rotor means long life with little maintenance.
07 / horizon
Aerospace and eVTOL
An exploratory frontier where inherent fault safety and a field that can be commanded off are exactly the properties electrified flight is looking for.
Where we are
Building toward production
Stage
An early-stage deep tech company developing the architecture toward production.
Focus
Magnet-free motors and generators across vehicles, off-highway, marine, and wind.
Intellectual property
Core architecture protected by US 11,476,786 B2.
A magnet-free path to production
Our work is taking the architecture from proven principle to production-relevant machines, alongside the partners who build the systems it will power.
We are talking with drivetrain OEMs, propulsion integrators, and investors who want a path forward that does not depend on rare-earth magnets.
Open to partners and investors
The team
Founding team
The people building Kinetiq Drive, backed by deep expertise in electric machine design.
DT
Dorsa Talebi
Co-founder & CEO
Leads strategy, product, and partnerships, taking the wirelessly excited architecture from patented principle toward production with drivetrain OEMs and investors.
MS
Mehdi Seyedi
Co-founder
Drives the technical development of the machine, translating the core electromagnetic concept into production-relevant motor and generator designs.
HT
Hamid Toliyat
Technical Advisory Board
A globally recognized authority on electric machines and drives and an IEEE Fellow, bringing decades of research in advanced motor topologies to the development of the WESM.
Get in touch
Let's put a magnet-free machine in your drivetrain.
Whether you build vehicles, vessels, turbines, or the systems behind them, we would like to show you what the WESM can do for your platform.
Start a conversation
Tell us about your platform and where magnet supply, maintenance, or field control is a constraint. We will follow up to explore how the WESM fits.
Prefer email? hello@kinetiqdrive.com