Atomic Machines Emerges from Stealth with $250 Million to Launch the Matter Compiler, an AI-Native Manufacturing System That Builds Micro-Machines from Code

Its first product is PrimeSwitch, a previously unbuildable power relay that opens in microseconds for the 800-volt power systems of AI data centers

EMERYVILLE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Atomic Machines today emerged from six years in stealth to introduce the Matter Compiler, the first in a new class of AI-native, all-digital manufacturing systems that build working machines directly from code. The Matter Compiler is aimed at micro-machines: motors and gears the size of a grain of sand, robots small enough to work inside the body, cooling built directly into the chips that run AI, and the many devices like them that have been waiting on a way to build them. The company also announced PrimeSwitch, the first micro-machine produced by the Matter Compiler: an electromechanical power relay that opens in 50 microseconds, about a thousand times faster than a conventional contactor, with no sacrifice in conduction efficiency.

Atomic Machines was founded by Jeff Holden, who joined Amazon as its tenth engineer, built Amazon Prime and rose to senior vice president, then became Uber's first chief product officer and founded its self-driving, AI labs and air-taxi divisions. The company has raised $250 million to date from investors including OneIM, Gigafund, XTX Ventures, KAS Venture Partners, Valor Equity Partners, Tru Arrow Partners, Construct Capital, Sozo Ventures and the Regents of the University of California. PrimeSwitch will be shown publicly for the first time at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit in San Jose, October 12–15.

A gap in how the world makes things

Conventional manufacturing (casting, molding, machining) hits its limits in the low tens of microns. Below that, the dominant capability is semiconductor fabrication, built to do one thing extraordinarily well: pattern flat electronic circuits in silicon. The MEMS industry has coaxed about a dozen commercial device categories from that toolset, among them accelerometers, gyroscopes and micro-mirrors, but under the field's own maxim, "one product, one process," each new device class takes years of custom process development. The result is that micro-machines, one of the most promising unexplored frontiers in hardware, have been blocked not by physics but by manufacturing.

Two breakthroughs

The Matter Compiler brings two breakthroughs to that problem. First, it is a general-purpose constructor: a single system in which code alone determines the device produced, building complete, functional, three-dimensional machines with moving parts, many materials and assembled subsystems, with features down to single-digit microns, and with no hard tooling of any kind. No new manufacturing process has to be engineered for a new device. Second, the entire physical manufacturing system sits inside the AI's loop: every operation is measured with high-precision metrology and corrected in real time, and the AI runs its own experiments on its own hardware to test what simulation proposes. Design intelligence and manufacturing were built together.

"3D printing made shapes programmable: any geometry, straight from a file. We're making machines programmable: many materials, moving parts, sealed and wired, straight from a file," said Jeff Holden, founder and CEO of Atomic Machines. "When the marginal cost of a new design is the cost of the design file, you get an innovation explosion, and micro-machines are where that explosion has been waiting to happen."

"AI has made it almost trivial to create software: say what you want and it exists. The physical world has not taken that leap, because manufacturing was never built for it. The Matter Compiler will let anyone describe an arbitrary micro-machine in code and get a working device out the other end. If vibe coding is how software gets made now, this is the start of vibe manufacturing. Enabling a world with that kind of creativity and abundance is why Gigafund invested in Atomic Machines," said Luke Nosek, Managing Partner at Gigafund.

Rewriting manufacturing economics

Manufacturing wisdom holds that flexibility trades against economics: low unit costs come from committing to tooling and a fixed process, and every design change reopens that bill. Because the Matter Compiler requires neither, its flexibility and its economics arise from the same property rather than competing with each other. A lot size of one carries no engineering charge and no process development. At volume, the same fab that builds one design builds any other, so capital is amortized across every product ever run on it. High-mix and high-volume production happen in the very same fab.

PrimeSwitch: the first micro-machine out of the Matter Compiler

PrimeSwitch was chosen as the company's first product six years ago, from first principles. Power density in electrical systems has risen for a century and will keep rising, and the two technologies for controlling that power each hit a wall. Semiconductors switch fast but lose energy as heat in continuous conduction. Electromechanical relays and contactors conduct almost losslessly and can open a true gap, but they take milliseconds to do it, and at high power they open into an arc. AI data centers, now moving to 800-volt DC distribution to feed racks of unprecedented power density, have made that gap acute: at those voltages a fault delivers destructive energy in microseconds and burns as an arc that direct current will not extinguish on its own. Conventional mechanical protection opens in milliseconds, orders of magnitude too slow, and then has to put out an arc of its own. Solid-state protection is fast and arcless, but a semiconductor cannot provide galvanic isolation, so a mechanical contactor must still sit beside it, and its silicon, cooling and footprint grow with every amp it carries continuously. The industry has seen this coming. Its roadmaps for 800-volt distribution call for protection faster than any mechanical device available today.

PrimeSwitch PS-150 is a bistable electromechanical relay that opens in 50 microseconds, with on-resistance of 200 micro-ohms, 1,500 volts of galvanic isolation and a continuous current rating of 150 amps, in a hermetically sealed surface-mount package 9.5 millimeters across and 3 millimeters thick. It holds its state with zero power. Deployed in a hybrid breaker alongside a small solid-state bypass that carries the current for the microseconds the contact is opening, the PS-150 delivers the conduction efficiency and galvanic isolation of a mechanical contact with opening speed in the microseconds regime of solid-state protection, a combination no one had managed to build. The silicon interrupts; the metal carries and isolates; the breaker never arcs. Semiconductor fabs cannot process PrimeSwitch's materials or assemble its moving parts, and no conventional tool can reach its feature sizes. It exists because the Matter Compiler exists.

PrimeSwitch PS-150 is currently shipping to early-access customers for evaluation.

On the name

The Matter Compiler takes its name from Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age, in which matter compilers assemble objects atom-by-atom from digital specifications. For further background on Atomic Machines, read Jeff Holden's origin story essay.

About Atomic Machines

Atomic Machines is building the Matter Compiler, an AI-native, all-digital manufacturing system that builds working micro-machines directly from code, and PrimeSwitch, its first product family. Founded by Jeff Holden, the company has raised $250 million to date. Atomic Machines is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, with offices in Emeryville and Santa Clara. Learn more at atomicmachines.com.