Fort Worth company plans to add 3,000 high-skilled jobs
Linear Labs, a maker of small electric motors, wants to revolutionize the industry and has chosen Fort Worth to be its home.
With humble beginnings as a father-son project, the company plans to aggressively ramp up from 100 employees to 3,000 by 2030, said co-founder and CEO Brad Hunstable. They’ll move into a more than 100,000-square foot factory space in the AllianceTexas Mobility Innovation Zone within 18 months, but hiring has already begun.
“Fort Worth is in a unique position to be the center piece globally of new electrification,” Hunstable said. “I want to build the next Siemens or GE right here in Fort Worth.”
More detail about the company’s investment and local and federal incentives will be released in the coming months, he said.
Linear Labs is focused on developing cheaper, more powerful electric motors — the kind that can make scooters and e-bikes more affordable, but can also power them up steep hills or allow them to last longer on the road.
In it’s simplest description, the motor design is able to achieve high torque and energy production even at very low engine speeds. Hunstable boasts it is “the biggest discovery in electric motors in 100 years.”
The new class of electric motor are capable of more than two times the torque and two times the output of the traditional magnet motors. The company said this tech will lead to a 10% range increase for electric vehicles, more efficient HVAC units and lighter and more powerful wind turbines.
Traditional electric motor production requires low-skill jobs, but Hunstable bluntly said that’s not what the company is interested in. Instead it will be hiring electrical and robotic engineers, software designers and technicians trained to work along side robots on the factory floor. The average wage is expected to be above $90,000, Hunstable said.
He said he is already in talks with Tarrant County College about workforce training.
Fred Hunstable, his father, discovered the technology by accident in their Grandbury machine shop. The pair wanted to figure out how to use old-school farm windmills to produce electricity and pump water for cities in the developing world.
In 2013 they established the company and have been operating out of an 11,000 square foot lab space in Fort Worth and a factory in Mexico.
Linear Labs will pivot its focus from the Mexico plant to its new North Texas headquarters.
“That’s re-shoring at it’s best,” Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price said Friday during her 2020 State of the City address, where she publicly announced the move.
Hunstable had success in Silicon Valley.
He co-founded the video streaming service Ustream, which IBM acquired in 2016 for $150 million. He ranked among the 50 “Digital Power Players” by the Hollywood Reporter and was honored as Variety’s Producers Guild of America’s Digital 25: Visionaries, Innovators and Producers.
Hunstable is admittedly “bullish” about the tech, but he believes Linear Labs is entering the market at the right time. From Tesla to Detroit, car makers are looking for high-tech engines. On top of the, new regulation for air condition efficiency means HVAC systems will need to run better at lower costs.
“Everyone is going electric,” he said. “If you have the best electric motor in the world you win.”
This story was originally published February 28, 2020 at 1:39 PM.
