In America everyone is talking about bringing manufacturing home, especially when it comes to drones and robots. Michael Van Steenburg claims he's a step ahead of them. He spent the last decade building all kinds of electric motors in the US and North America, and now, with his new startup Modal Motors, he wants to do it once more - but this time entirely without rare-earth magnets, so that the US can cut itself loose even further from the Chinese supply chain.

"China has already flexed its muscles several times," he says, referring to Chinese restrictions on access to rare-earth products. He points the blade at the competition: "Others are reshoring, but they're essentially copying Chinese motors and just making them in the US. They're hoping the American rare-earth magnet system develops fast enough. It will be a long time before they can really replace China." A domestic supply of those materials is still years away, he argues.

The startup is developing two products. The first is a small electric motor for drones that can also work in fans and actuators, and according to the company it's designed for the lowest possible mass with the highest possible torque density and efficiency. The second is more radical: the so-called Hybrid Enigma Drive, a flat motor that fits into tight spaces. Van Steenburg will pitch both to investors next month at one of the bigger American startup competitions.

He admits the irony himself. In the late 1990s he worked on a petrol-electric hybrid drive that China wanted to fit into its so-called "people's car". "It's kind of comical," he says today. "I always tell people the clock started ticking 25 years ago. All that time I've been watching a train wreck in slow motion: China going around the world, grabbing mines, grabbing mineral rights, and slowly but surely monopolising the entire rare-earth supply chain."

The question is which will come first - a rare-earth-free motor that works well enough, or American magnets that Van Steenburg himself sees as years away. For Europe, which also buys its magnets mostly from China, it's hardly someone else's dilemma.