Steinmetz
Hardware for Electric Vehicles.
Owen Brake, Founder
Ethan Childerhose, Founder
Hey YC,
We are Ethan and Owen, building the engine of electric vehicles. Motor controllers with 3x higher power densities, that remain cost competitive with existing solutions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIQkUCxhIG4
The Problem
Automotive manufacturers are quickly transitioning to electric vehicles but initial offerings remain expensive and are largely unprofitable. This has led to slow adoption compared to their combustion engine counterparts.
We have both witnessed while working at Tesla, the immense difference in design and cost between Tesla's vehicles, and EVs from existing vehicle manufacturers. Incumbent part suppliers and manufacturers are skilled in the intricate mechanical design of combustion engine vehicles, but lack the electrical expertise for EVs which are primarily chips and PCBs.
Our Solution
At Steinmetz, we are starting with the inverter (motor controller). This lies between the battery of the vehicle and the motor--it converts the DC power from the battery into 3 phase AC for the motor. Using modern power electronics techniques and tight systems integration, we are able to deliver a motor controller which achieves 3x greater density than the state of the art, at equal or greater efficiency. This allows us to bring down not only the unit cost of inverters in vehicles today but, through greater density and higher efficiencies, the cost and performance of the whole vehicle.
To give context for the density improvements here, our bandgap product is able to drive a peak power of 200kW through the equivalent volume of 3 yerba mate cans. This is the same power draw as 450x 4090 GPUs or 6.5 server racks fully populated with H100 GPUs (208 GPUs).
We are on a mission to simplify electric vehicle hardware and accelerate adoption
If you are working on any electric vehicle (trains, cars, boats, snowmobiles, cranes, submarines, planes, tractors, etc.) learn more at steinmetzmotors.com or send us an email: founders@steinmetzmotors.com
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Company Photo
How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)
We both grew up in the suburbs of Toronto and graduated from Mechatronics Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Despite similar journeys we didn’t finally meet until we interned together at Neuralink during our Junior year. We bonded over our passion for engineering and stayed in touch into our Senior year where we built the first Steinmetz inverter. We have both worked in the automotive industry working with low and high voltage systems at Tesla and have experience across the hardware stack. Between us we have worked on billion transistor GPUs, space systems, neural interface ICs, billion record databases, rail systems, and firmware for mass produced consumer electronics. Steinmetz marks a new chapter for us where we are leveraging our broad experience across the hardware stack to enable the next generation of electric vehicles.
What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?
Our mission is to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles of all forms (planes, trains, cars, boats). To achieve this we aim to improve the performance of electric vehicles while reducing cost and volume. We will enable vehicles that beat their combustion engine equivalents on all metrics. Electric power-trains are capable of achieving nearly perfect efficiency converting stored energy to motion which is not possible in combustion engine vehicles. Through the refinement and adoption of electric vehicles we can greatly reduce the cost to transport people and goods. This will have Trillion dollar implications for the global economy.