🕶️ One startup just quit China cold

Morning, team. 🕶️

Modal Motors is building electric motors with no rare-earth magnets,the materials one country digs up, processes, and has restricted before.

Founder Michael Van Steenburg pitched at TechCrunch Disrupt: motors for drones and robots that skip the geopolitical landmine in everyone else's supply chain.

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So here's the plot twist nobody in hardware wanted: the entire electric motor industry runs on magnets, and those magnets run on materials mostly dug up and processed in one country. Guess which one.

Enter Modal Motors, founded by Michael Van Steenburg, currently strutting through the Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt. Their pitch? Build small, punchy electric motors in the U.S. with zero rare-earth magnets. For drones, fans, blowers, robots. Plus a flat "Hybrid Enigma Drive" for tight spaces.

Here's the myth Modal is busting: everyone thinks "made in America" equals safe. Van Steenburg says nope. If you're still buying rare-earth magnets, you're just renting a vulnerability with an American zip code. Domestic supply of that stuff is years out, and China has restricted access before.

And the uncomfortable part for investors… Two years ago the money chased rare-earth mining. Twelve months ago, processing. This quarter, the smart play might be skipping the material entirely. That deflates a lot of "onshore the supply chain" thesis decks.

So the real question for hardware founders isn't where you build. It's what you build with. Audit your Bill of Materials for single-source geopolitical landmines, and quit treating "made in America" as the finish line.

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In case you've been living under a rock, an AI just did the thing every biotech founder swore was still "years away." Claude found a novel enzyme system. Nobody told it to. It just went looking.

Picture roughly 950 AI agents grinding for 21 hours, chewing through 210 million tokens, and spitting out the array-associated reverse transcriptase (ART) system: a reverse transcriptase, a partner gene, and a long stretch of evenly spaced DNA repeats that look suspiciously like a CRISPR array. This is the Gattaca plot twist nobody storyboarded. And it's real. Anthropic dropped a pre-print to prove it wasn't a fluke.

Here's the part that stings. Feng Zhang, the CRISPR heavyweight from MIT and the Broad, called it "an exciting example of how AI agents can contribute to biological discovery." When the guy who helped write the CRISPR story nods, you listen.

Because your entire pitch might be one "human-discovered target." Two years ago AI just crunched data. Nine months ago it folded proteins. This week it's doing de novo discovery. The moat you're selling could shrink to a puddle overnight. So stop selling the molecule. Start selling the machine that finds molecules.

Looking ahead to Spring 2026… Anthropic spins up a dedicated life sciences lab. Watch it closely. That's your early warning system.

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