This company says it’s building future of electric transportation in north Fort Worth
The company started as a father-son project in a garage in Granbury, and with help from the city of Fort Worth, its CEO believes it has the potential to become the General Electric of electric motors.
Electric motor startup Linear Labs makes high-efficiency electric motors at its production line at Interstate 35W and North Loop 820 in far north Fort Worth.
In 2021, Linear Labs became the first company to take advantage of a program to support research and development for startups when it signed a deal for $68.9 million in tax credits.
Mayor Mattie Parker, city council members and city employees toured Linear Labs headquarters on Wednesday, and got to test ride an electric moped the company is developing for a California based e-bike retailer.
“I want one,” said District 6 council member Jared Williams after taking a spin around the parking lot.
Linear Labs motors are primarily used in electric bikes and motorcycles, but the company is researching ways to scale them up to power trucks and electric cars.
The global electric bike market was valued at $17.56 billion in 2021, and is expected grow to $40.98 billion by 2030, according to a report by Precedence Research. The electric vehicle market was valued at $171.26 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow to $725.14 billion by 2026, according to data from research firm Mordor Intelligence.
Linear Labs builds its motors by hand, but is looking for ways to automate.
Once his company gets the machinery to automate production, CEO Brad Hunstable estimated it could produce 100,000 motors per year.
“But I want to get to tens of millions of motors. I want to build a giggafactory,” he said referencing the Tesla Motors plant outside Sparks, Nevada.
That’s still a long way off, and Hunstable said he’ll need to raise millions more to get to that size.
That tax credit was a big reason Linear Labs chose to open up shop in Fort Worth, Hunstable said.
“It’s capital intensive, and it takes public private partnerships to scale these companies up,” he said.
Most of the city’s economic incentive packages entail some form of property tax abatement, however, that’s not helpful to startup companies that don’t own property, said Michael Hennig, the city’s economic development manager.
So in 2017 the city developed a research and development tax credit program.
Qualifying companies can get tax credits worth up to half of their research and development spending. The companies can then sell those tax credits to other Fort Worth property owners as a way to generate income for more research and development.
So startups get more money to develop and the property owner who bought the credit can get a break on their tax bill.
The company has 50 employees with plans to grow to 100 employees by the end of the year and 1,000 in the next five years, Hunstable said.
He wasn’t certain about the average salary of his current employees, but told the Star-Telegram in 2020, he expects the average annual salary to be above $90,000.
Hunstable started the company as a project with his father, Fred, when they were trying to figure out how to make small electric electric motors that could drive water pumps in Sub-Saharan Africa.
“I’ve always been concerned about human suffering, and human suffering at its most fundamental level is an energy issue,” Hunstable said
A University of Oxford found that 1.23 million people died worldwide in 2017 due to lack of clean drinking water.
Hunstable talked on the Innovate Fort Worth podcast in September 2020 about working with his father to build a simple motor that could be powered by an old farm windmill.
He explained how farm windmills can take relatively small amounts of energy and use it to pump water from a well. Hunstable and his father built on that concept to create a linear generator that uses the up-and-down pumping motion from the windmill and convert it into energy.
They then took the next step to convert that linear generator into a rotary motor that could power things like electric bikes and motorcycles.
This story was originally published March 9, 2022 at 5:13 PM.
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