Vimag Labs is building an electric motor that works without rare-earth magnets
The Bengaluru-based company replaces the permanent magnets inside an electric motor with power electronics and control software and is running pilots with vehicle manufacturers.
Almost every electric vehicle on the road runs a permanent magnet synchronous motor. Magnets made from rare-earth elements sit in the rotor and produce the magnetic field the motor turns against. They are efficient, compact and powerful, and they are the reason an electric drivetrain depends on a supply chain most manufacturers cannot control.
Rare-earth refining is heavily concentrated. A large majority of the world's capacity sits in a small number of facilities outside India, and both price and availability have moved sharply in recent years. For a manufacturer planning volume production, that is a procurement risk sitting inside every vehicle it builds.
The alternatives are not new. Induction motors and wound-rotor machines have existed for a century and avoid magnets entirely, but they have generally been heavier or less efficient than a permanent magnet design at the same output.
was founded in Bengaluru in September 2025 by Manish Seth and Piyush Desai to take the magnets out. Its motor is called the Virtual Magnet Synchronous Motor, and the name describes the approach: rather than fixed magnets, the machine generates its magnetic field electronically.
A magnetic field made by software
The rotor carries windings instead of magnets, and power electronics and control software supply and shape the field while the motor runs. The company describes the design as largely software-defined, with magnetic flux controlled in real time rather than fixed by the material in the rotor. Getting power into a spinning rotor without brushes that wear is the classic difficulty, and the patent covers a rotating transformer that does it contactlessly.
That control is what the company presents as the advantage beyond the supply chain. A permanent magnet produces the same field whatever the motor is doing. A field that can be varied can in principle be tuned to the load, which the company says makes the motor more adaptable across driving conditions.
The prototype it has described runs at 6 kW continuous and 10 kW peak, producing between 48 and 58 Newton metres of torque. The company says it is targeting efficiency and performance comparable to conventional permanent magnet motors.
Its fifth Indian patent, granted in July 2026, covers a rotating transformer-excited synchronous motor and its control, which is the core of the architecture. The company says a set of ten patent applications and fifteen trademarks are in progress.
Accel and the pilots that follow
Vimag raised $5 million, about Rs 43 crore, in a round announced in January 2026 and led by Accel, with Chakra Growth Fund and Thinkuvate participating. The money is for commercialising the motor platform and expanding engineering and manufacturing.
The company says it has moved past laboratory development and is running pilot projects with two-wheeler and passenger vehicle manufacturers. It is also extending the platform towards light and heavy commercial vehicles and industrial systems, including heating, ventilation, air-conditioning and refrigeration, where motors run for long hours, and the same rare-earth exposure applies.
None of those pilot partners has been named, and no commercial contract or production programme has been announced. A motor design has to survive a manufacturer's own validation before it reaches a vehicle, and that process is measured in years. What the company has built in under a year is an intellectual property position and a working prototype. Turning that into a motor inside a vehicle a buyer can order is the part still ahead.
(This story has been researched and compiled using publicly available information.)