As the world accelerates toward electrification, one massive frontier remains largely untouched: the billion-plus small internal combustion engines powering two-wheelers, agricultural equipment, and industrial tools. Conifer, a deep-tech startup co-founded by Ankit Somani an alumnus of Apple, Lucid, and Google is aiming to change that.
In this interview, Ankit shares how Conifer is pioneering a new class of magnet-free electric motors designed for scalability, sustainability, and high performance. From reimagining motor architecture to building modular manufacturing systems, Conifer is betting on radical engineering to push electrification beyond early adopters and into the global mainstream.
1. What motivated your shift from Apple, Lucid, and Google to founding Conifer.io?
The world has 1B+ small IC engines that are used in products like two-wheelers, agricultural equipment, power tools, Industrial automation. Today, the penetration of electrification is <5% over this install capacity. Our mission is to rapidly scale Electrification and Physical automation.
The core building block of Electrified products in the motor and the powertrain. We saw a lot of inefficiencies in incumbent solutions including lower efficiency, poor supply chains with heavy dependence on rare-earth materials, and very CapEx heavy manufacturing lines with poor ROI.
If we want the world to go beyond early adopters and get to 50%+ electrification penetration, we need to fundamentally rethink these core ‘electric engines’ such that they become more reliable, cost-effective and easy to source and build. This will help OEMs in creating products that are far better than ICE equivalents in both performance and cost, hence unleash broader acceptance.
In China 85%+ two-wheelers are electric. It’s time to make sure that the rest of the world doesn’t get left behind.
2. How did you overcome the technical hurdles of developing magnet-free motors?
So far, OEMs had only two options: Go with rare-earth magnet dependent motors OR go with poor performance and higher cost magnet free solutions. We want to give them an alternative which performs better than rare-earth motors but still can be indigenously sourced and are cost-effective.
To do that, we had to rethink the key electromagnetic component, the stator. We had a breakthrough which allowed it to use way less materials, generate much higher magnetic flux and be able to manufacture it at a fraction of the cost. This allowed us to use indigenously sourced weaker magnets that are 86% rust! These magnets are brittle and spinning them at high speeds can be difficult, which is the next engineering problem we solved. Finally, packaging across different elements of the motor and gearbox in a compact volume allowed us to lower the weight of the system.
In-short, there are multiple patented innovations, across hardware, software and manufacturing processes, that compound together to deliver performance and cost better than rare-earth solutions.
3. Why is modularity critical in Conifer’s design, and how does it support scalability?
Very often the motor Manufacturing line with custom Tooling is created with one SKU of product in mind. Not only that makes it CapEx heavy, the manufacturer then needs to see significant demand for that one SKU before they get ROI on their investment. If they have to build another SKU with lets say twice the power requirement, they need to essentially set up a new line.
We took a different approach
Conifer’s modular design allows us to reuse similarly sourced parts to create multiple SKUs of product. A no-tool Manufacturing process that can be altered based on customer input via software then allows us to use the same line across product SKUs and get to high utilization quickly. Our Manufacturing cell can then be replicated as demand surges. Using locally sourced components also allows us to make the product more economically within the same geography.
4. What are your top engineering priorities following the $20M funding round?
So far we were focused on doing two things: (a) Proving out the underlying technology (b) Building products that are validated by customers, in the field. We have been fortunate in getting a lot of customer interest. So our major focus now is scaling up manufacturing. We are also continuously releasing new products and showing them in customer applications
5. How has your big-tech experience shaped Conifer’s innovation culture?
A key thing we learned from our past experiences is that customers don’t just buy performance and cost – they buy Trust. That’s the key product attribute that Big Tech companies sell. That’s one of the reasons we waited a bit to prove our technology, before coming out. Today, we are intensely focused on the Manufacturing process and Supply Chain so that customers can trust the longevity of the offering.
