Atomic Machines

On October 7, 2026, Atomic Machines announced the end of six years of stealth development and said it had raised $250 million to date, without disclosing a valuation or the breakdown by round. Investors include OneIM, Gigafund, XTX Ventures, KAS Venture Partners, Valor Equity Partners, Sozo Ventures and the Regents of the University of California. Luke Nosek, managing partner at Gigafund, said that if vibe coding is how software gets made now, this is the start of “vibe manufacturing.”⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

The company says it exists to “relentlessly advance humanity’s command of matter” and that its mission is “on-demand universal command of matter.” Founder and chief executive Jeff Holden said that 3D printing made shapes programmable and that Atomic Machines is making machines programmable.⁠[2][3][1]

The company’s core product is the Matter Compiler, an AI-native manufacturing stack for micro-machines that builds working micro-machines directly from digital code. The devices it makes have moving parts, multiple materials and features down to single-digit microns, with no molds, masks, fixtures or other fixed tooling, and code alone decides what the system builds. The company says conventional manufacturing hits its limits at a few tens of microns, below which only chipmaking tools remain, and that each new microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) device made with them needs years of custom process work.⁠[2][2][1][1][1][1]

The company describes the Matter Compiler as a “self-driving fab” that builds what is designed, measures what it built and carries what it learned into the next design, so that every iteration is a change in software rather than in the factory. The system measures and corrects every step in real time and its AI runs its own experiments on the hardware; the company’s aim is “one-shot prompt-to-product,” in which a user describes what a device should do and the system designs, simulates, writes its own process and builds it.⁠[4][4][1][4][4]

The Matter Compiler sits in a small industrial facility in Emeryville, California, and consists of a chain of 13 automated manufacturing machines that build and test a device’s components; the company’s AI analyzes thousands of experiments with standard manufacturing materials, finding patterns in how they interact in order to piece together viable device designs. For now engineers still move components between machines and help assemble the final device, which the company hopes the machines will eventually do on their own; the more devices it builds, the more data it generates, and that data is used to improve the process.⁠[5][5][5][5][5][5]

Holden said the name is a tip of the hat to science fiction author Neal StephensonNeal StephensonNeal Stephenson is an American author of science fiction and historical fiction whose best-known works include Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle. He coined the term “metaverse” in Snow Crash (1992), and his novels are known for their detailed imagining of technology and the information society, influencing generations of technologists; he also took part in the early work of Blue Origin, served as Magic Leap’s chief futurist and co-founded the blockchain platform Lamina1.Open the full entry and the matter compiler imagined in his novel The Diamond Age, and that the company is building “the real, bounded, near-term beginning” of that idea, starting at the microscale. Applications the company envisions include gears the size of a grain of sand, robots small enough to work inside the body and cooling built into AI chips.⁠[6][1][1]

PrimeSwitch PS-150 is the first micro-machine made by the Matter Compiler, which the company calls a new class of electromechanical relay that can only be built in the Matter Compiler. It is meant for AI data centers moving to 800-volt direct current, where a fault can release destructive energy in microseconds while mechanical protection takes milliseconds to open. Conventional electromechanical relays conduct efficiently but open slowly, while solid-state switches open quickly but suffer conduction losses and heat; PrimeSwitch aims to offer both.⁠[7][7][7][1][1][7]

According to the company’s published specifications, PrimeSwitch carries 150 amps of continuous AC or DC current without active cooling, opens in 50 microseconds (about 1,000 times faster than a conventional contactor, the company says), has an on-resistance of 200 microohms and true galvanic isolation at 1,500 volts, holds its state on zero power in bistable operation, and is a single-pole single-throw surface-mount device 9.5 millimeters across and 3 millimeters thick. At launch it was shipping to unnamed early-access customers for evaluation, and the company had not published a price or production volume.⁠[7][7][1][7][7][1][1]

Mickael Mauger, who builds power equipment for data centers, recalled that he had previously had to choose between a slow mechanical switch the size of a baseball and a fast silicon switch that wastes large amounts of electricity; after receiving this fingertip-sized switch, he asked the company, “How is this even possible?”⁠[5][5][5][5]

On the day of the launch, Holden published three essays on the company’s website. In Atomic Machines Origin Story he argued that civilizational progress runs along three axes, energy, information and matter, with matter the one the other two run on; taking the ribosome as a benchmark, he wrote that every existing human manufacturing system embeds the design in hardware such as molds and masks, and described the Matter Compiler as the first manufacturing system with the same architecture as biology’s, a combinatorial constructor whose unit of output is the working machine.⁠[6][6][6][6]

In The Micro-machine Universe he defined a machine by three functions, transduce, shape and direct, across seven physical domains (mechanical, fluidic, thermal, electromagnetic and optical, charged-particle, chemical and electrical), argued that semiconductor manufacturing has mastered only the single cell of information processing in the electrical domain, and gave three reasons to start at the microscale: the physics favors small machines, the economics compound through batch production, and the territory has few existing manufacturers. In The Lockstep he argued that civilization advances in lockstep with its command of matter, and that at every great transition matter, not ideas, was the gate.⁠[8][8][8][8][8][8][9][9]

The company said it would show PrimeSwitch in public for the first time at the Open Compute Project Global Summit in San Jose from October 12 to 15, 2026.⁠[1]

Eugene Chow, an electrical engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said efforts to revamp manufacturing in this way are rare and enormously difficult and that “the US desperately needs more of this,” noting that AI-driven design has exploded while the means of realizing those designs physically remain very primitive. At the same time, the system is not yet fully automated, and engineers still move parts between its 13 machines and help with assembly.⁠[5][5][5][10]

As of October 2026, Atomic Machines is led by founder and chief executive Jeff Holden; its chief technical officer is Klaus Zietlow, formerly system architect for Verb Surgical’s surgical robot; James Stölken, vice president of device and Matter Compiler engineering, spent 25 years at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Marta D’Elia, director of AI, modeling and simulation, spent 10 years at Sandia National Laboratories; and head of production manufacturing John Haruff previously worked at Applied Materials and Lam Research.⁠[3][3][3][3][3]

The company has offices in Emeryville (62nd Street) and Santa Clara (Oakmead Village Court), California, and as of October 2026 was recruiting for 21 open positions across teams including AI, device, electrical, mechanical, software and systems engineering; it runs an in-house machine shop and a devices lab equipped with scanning electron microscopes, CT, coordinate measuring machines and high-speed cameras.⁠[11][11][11][11]

Atomic Machines: Official website: https://www.atomicmachines.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[12]