Westmag launches South San Francisco factory to scale drone motors
Westmag opened Factory 01 in South San Francisco with a goal of making more than 30 million drone motors and actuators a year by 2030. The plant could test whether the Bay Area can add advanced manufacturing.
A drone-motor factory in South San Francisco is betting the Bay Area can do more than design chips and biotech. Westmag, short for Western Magnetics Company, emerged from stealth on June 2 with Factory 01, its launch manufacturing facility and headquarters, and said it wants to scale production of drone motors and actuators to more than 30 million units a year by 2030.
The company said it had already closed an $11 million seed round in 2025, led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Founders Fund, Lux Capital, NFDG and Menlo Ventures. At Factory 01, Westmag said it designs, automatically winds, assembles and validates every motor and actuator on an integrated production platform, putting engineering and manufacturing under one roof in South San Francisco.
Westmag said it had spent months building industrial capacity, securing suppliers and validating products with high-volume customers before going public. It is now ramping production to fulfill committed orders for hundreds of thousands of units, a scale that will determine whether Factory 01 becomes a meaningful regional production site or remains an early-stage outpost in an industry still dominated overseas.
The company is making a direct supply-chain argument for why South San Francisco matters. Westmag said China has held the vast majority of global drone motor and robot actuator component production for decades, and it framed its Bay Area launch as part of an effort to onshore critical manufacturing. That pitch comes as drones and humanoid robots become bigger buyers of precision components. Westmag said aerial drones typically use four or more electric motors, while humanoid robots can require 20 or more actuators with embedded electric motors.
Demand may also be shifting. Westmag pointed to a December 2025 move by the Federal Communications Commission that it described as effectively banning the sale of new models of foreign-made drones and critical components, including motors. If that policy keeps nudging buyers toward domestic suppliers, South San Francisco could become a small but telling test of whether U.S. manufacturers can win back a piece of the market.
Westmag said it is vertically integrating design, manufacturing and supply chain work, and that it is building a shared architecture for both motors and actuators. It is hiring across manufacturing, supply chain, design engineering, automation, sales and operations in South San Francisco, a sign that the factory’s footprint could extend beyond the production floor into a broader advanced-manufacturing workforce.
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