welcome to whose newsletter is it anyway?
Issue #007 · July 2026
...the Powertrain newsletter where the jokes are made up (by me, not Claude) and your participation matters. The Powertrain recounts our mission-driven, core-value-guided company's saga through and after commercialization. With Q2 behind us, progress from "the company and I" to "we" is becoming tangible, but miles to go before we sleep on our commercial pilots. If you’re new (or missed Powertrain Update #006), welcome aboard and get comfy; building a company is not a short journey.
tl;dr
- FluxBucks:Q2 revenue $479.8K (▲35.3% YoY).Burn is up too (deliberately: tooling for pilots). $3.2M projected CY26 revenue. More in Financial Snapshot below.
- NASA doubled down:$825k Phase III inbound + Phase II-E selection (1 of 18 across all NASA SBIR companies); $1.2M total and CCRPP eligibility.
- Army re-routed, didn't stop:CATALYST ($15M IDIQ) died; Congress authorized a $30M Phase II Strategic Breakthrough. Proposal submitted July with BAE Systems, Army GVSC, and Operational Energy-Innovation support.
- NSF joined in: TECP Supplementawarded in June on the strength of our pilot partners' engagement.
- Pilots = behind. All of them:one shipment YTD. Recovery underway; no sugarcoating in “What is freaking me out.”
- [if !supportLists][endif]SBA:awarded FluxWorks Houston District SBIR innovator of the year,made a video, podcast, visited us, then visited us again.
- Team:first resignation in 18 months feedback insightful; great timing for leadership offsite + tightened hiring. More in “What I feel good about.”
- Site selection: Virginia doubles down; North Austin vs. Houston East End move conversations slow, expected to pick up steam in Fall through Winter.
- Life (High / Low / Water Buffalo): High: turning 30 & telling people about Jesus at an eponymous party. Low: FluxWorks for 4th out of 4 in our business park volleyball tournament. Feels bad to lose to your landlord, glad I didn't follow through with the double-or-nothing rent gamble offered. Water Buffalo: My hot wife Chloe (normally a full-time licensed architect) is starting to get called to do musical sets and business murals. We saw her first credited show, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoatin Houston on June 26th and it was brilliant!!!
what does fluxworks do?
We are building the future of the robotic supply chain. 🛠️🇺🇸
Our Celestial Gear™is reimagining robotics and automation from the ground up. Celestial Gear™ is the platform technology, and 2026 is about penetrating the market with the flagship product lines built on this technology, the CG- series gear. Later, the CGM- series actuator (a CG- series gear w/ motor + encoder) will drop.
Learn more about our core technologies here. Links to follow our socials in footer.
financial snapshot
Passed a three-year full-on financial audit (basically since beginning, had to make some calls about a check from April 2023). The books came back clean mostly, which in auditor is like a standing ovation (inclusive of the detail that there are two grumpy Muppets in the balcony who never clap for anything, so whatever). Now for some numbers & colored triangles (hell yeah):
▲Revenue (Q2 YoY):$479.8K vs. $354.7K [▲35.3%]
▲Monthly AverageNet Burn (Q2 YoY):$169.0K vs. $106.4K [▲58.8%]
Hungry Hungry Hardtech?The pilot-manufacturing hippo has plenty of revenue marbles to munch on. Net burn averaged $169K/month in Q2 and peaked at $215K in June as tooling spend hit; spend that converts to pilot deliveries, not drift. And each of our Phase II SBIRs is noticing the pilot traction and doubling down. Details on what "doubling down" means in Fundraising (the section). Imaged below is me fundraising (the gerund).
The Company She Told You Not to Worry About:the Texas Space Commission reviewed our books and waived documentation requirements for reimbursements (travel excepted)... the grant-world equivalent of TSA PreCheck. Credit: Marissa, Finance & Ops Coordinator and Neodyn-a-mite volleyball coach.
fundraising
One magnet, two magnet, red magnet, blue magnet. The non-dilutive fish are biting, so this quarter’s fundraising update comes to you in verse.
One magnet:The $30M Phase II Strategic Breakthrough RFP dropped June 30 (then mutated four times in eight days); we submitted July 14. Structure: $3.5M base over 12 months, plus a fund matching vehicle for venture capital+GVSC's $1.75M in FY27 program funding+BAE Systems purchase of the system — up to $30M total in non-dilutive match potential. Our Army champion is more engaged than ever after visiting FluxWorks HQ (we rescheduled our MRL Bootcamp Kansas thingy for it... worth it), and BAE Systems is, as always, aligned. So, we're over the embarrassment of the $15M IDIQ CATALYST friend-zoning us right after we made things Facebook Official; a “you up?” text from an opportunity twice as thicc will do that. Still, until the contract is in hand (and it must be before Sept. 30 or big sad), we'll hold fast to James 4:13-15.
Two magnet: NASA Goddard selected (and set aside $825k to fund) a SBIR Phase III for FluxSense, our Lodestar™-powered solution (introduced back in #002); the contract vehicle is being finalized now. Goddard wants our gizmo on the end of a Motiv xLink™ arm to demonstrate feeling up PV or RF tiles (we don't discriminate), closing an ISAM capability gap around metrology (Trajectory: FY28 FFR flight).
Red magnet: NASA also selected us for a Phase II-E (1 of only 18 companies across the entire NASA SBIR portfolio), growing an inbound Phase III from $825k to $1.2M total and unlocking eligibility for future NASA opportunities to commercialize. Preview of tentative celebratory post on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, but not the evil TikTok (we would never!).
Blue magnet: NSF awarded us a Technology Enhancement for Commercial Partnerships (TECP) Supplement in June. Translation: our pilot partners' engagement is now literally fundable. NSF looked at the commercial traction our pilots are generating and doubled down. When your Phase II agencies start adding chips mid-hand, you're allowed one small fist pump.
learnings since last time
Praxis accelerator (see #005), touchpoint 2 of 3 (highlight reel above): still paying for itself in hard questions from people with no reason to flatter us. Paying for itself is also an expression, seeing as the opt-in investment significantly outweighs program fees. The books below went to leadership for offsite discussion — assigned when I realized Core Values #2 (and #1) weren't taking root because leadership (hi) wasn't consistently modeling them.
team🧑🔧
New Blood:A recent great hire joined knowing FluxWorks is seriously considering a move to Houston’s 2nd Ward — if anything, thatpushed the opportunity over the edge. That pattern is becoming hard to ignore: the talent we need is increasingly pulled toward inner-loop Houston, and the move conversation feels less like disruption and more like gravity. Still, the Summer heat and contracting uncertainty across all government programs in the pipeline have slowed the Virginia/North Austin/Houston site selection a whole lot.
Alex, full-time, in the building: Alex Lee went full-time in June, and having our CSO physically present is doing what strategy calls never could: sales and engineering are starting to speak the same core-value dialect. Deals inform designs, designs inform deals, and the handoffs fumble less. Still ways to go, and, as you'll read below, the added sunlight also showed us exactly where the cracks are.
FluxWorkers in Boston at Robotics Expo.
Interns, twice declined, once humbled:Texas A&M offered six hand-picked students ($14k of costs covered) in February; Conroe EDC offered paid high-school interns in April; we said no to both... then hit June needing hands to make gears. We now have summer interns and are interviewing shop technicians.
SkillBridge, with an asterisk: we got a hit, our first SkillBridge hire (buyer/supply-chain) starts October. But looking in on a second-stage interview showed me our questions were softballs and some of our teams' “culture fit” notes had no evidence underneath. Our Director of Ops has begun to revamp the interview set, and further SkillBridge hiring is paused until we see how this one lands.
Culture, the parts that touch revenue: In July all staff trained on new SOPs so any FluxWorker can make rotors, and making magnets together tightened pace and communication more than any all-hands ever has.
The Level-Up:for the all-hands stuff with solid SOPs, the team is talking more than ever and a playfulness is growing. For example, I was witness to when a magnet gets inserted incorrectly into one of the jigs and it causes a break in the flow, rather than cursing under their breath, the mistake-maker yells "One Magnet!" and those hearing shout back "Two Magnet!" Immediately, the accident originator rallies again with "RED MAGNET!" causing myself, like others catching on while I was in the trenches making a rotor too, to roar "BLUE MAGNET!!!" keeping energy high.
The Gap: when gear assemblies break, our reflex is still panic-and-patch — fix fast, quantify never — which isn't QMS compliant nor a core value (see values above). For an AS9100D shop that's not a style preference, it's the certification. The Mission Sprint OKR and leadership core value realign re: offsite focus targets exactly this.
what i feel good about
Our first voluntary turnover in 18 months: Marissa (>2 years, the compliance warrior from above) took a fully remote gig and left with warm feelings, and an exit interview honest enough to matter: core-value inconsistency in one leadership layer, and how a Q1 dismissal of a hiring-miss landed. We responded within weeks: a leadership offsite, tightening of our hiring process (only just beginning), and a culture deck that previews expectations beginning day zero: judge for yourself below. (Also, her new company has a $300/month mani/pedi budget, which, respectfully, we cannot beat.)
Core Value Buy-In: While I was not in the room, apparently, in an all Engineering & Operations meeting, a relatively new hire defended an approach they took in saying, "it's not like the core values are ranked or something" and, I was told, "the whole room exploded," shouting, "THEY ARE RANKED," and proceeded to explain the ranking, then resumed the meeting.
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what is freaking me out
We are behind on gears. All of the commercial pilots are behind. This sentence physically hurts to type in a newsletter that promised “execute” two issues in a row. The pilots we teed up in #004 (Rockwell Automation, Douglas Machine, Aagard) are all running behind our commitments. The demand signal hasn’t weakened (we asked for folks to stop making intros back in #006). The constraint is still us: manufacturing throughput. Over July, all staff were trained on SOP documents created so we can all make rotors while we continue to qualify and work with outsourced vendors who are also taking time. And the Core Value #2 work from the Teamsection is part of the same fix... panic-patching broken gears is how you stay behind.
Army traction ≠ Army contract (yet): Re: One Magnet under Fundraisingon the nondilutive front, only 45 business days remain — fewer before contract shops close for the year — to get the Strategic Breakthrough on contract by Sept. 30. RFP to FluxWorks is Army SBIR agreeing the door exists; selected is someone actually unlocking it. And it rhymes with last year: a Phase II Sequential on a different-but-synergistic technology (re: #003) was approved over topic #A224-016, we submitted with GVSC and BAE support... and my roughly-bi-monthly check-ins keep coming back slower. The recurring nightmare of why is illustrated below.
what's next
- Get the Tier-1 OEM Pilots Out the Door: plans began back in #004, for the CPG robotics market we've targeted since #001. It ships. That's the sentence.
- Gettin Jiggy Wit' It: tooling for 3-digit annual gear volumes must be designed and outsourced now to be ready for 2027. The aim is to be pre-invested before the PO hits the door, not after.
- Government Program Ramp Up: The $4.95M in Phase II Strategic Breakthrough, NASA Phase III, Phase II-E, & TECP (1) aren't free, they have an SoW (2) they allhave to be spent in the 12-month period of performance. Our pipeline says programs more than twice the size which could hit before Spring as well. Oh, and I forgot to mention, our Department of the Air Force (DAF) Mentor-Protégé Program (MPP) proposal with Lockheed Martin Space was pre-approved & should be getting awarded soon too!
Next update: After Sept. 30 (next letter late October after Q3 financials close) possibilities of getting on contract (or not) for these selected and FY26 pipeline government programs will collapse to one single scenario.
what we need help with
1. Fewer Intros, More Boots on (Our) Ground
In this season, the primary intros that are helpful are folks that can spend at least part of their time physically here on site. If serious manufacturing consulting talent needs flights and a hotel to make on-site work, we'll cover both as part of compensation.
2. Site Visits of Motor Manufacturing Companies (or similar)
The CGM- series actuator (our gear + motor + encoder) drops in 2027, and “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit’ It” above means we’re designing tooling for 3-digit annual volumes now.Before we lay out our own lines, we want to stand on factory floors of people who’ve already made these mistakes: motor manufacturers, precision electromechanical assembly, and communicating findings on new product development testing for rapid iteration... that family. If you can host (or introduce us for) a site visit of a motor manufacturing plant or similar, we will show up with good questions, NDAs signed, and kolaches in hand. 🇺🇸 preferred but we will go (nearly) anywhere for the right opportunity.
3.Still Need That Manufacturing Engineer Lead (🚨#1 priority)
We need a killer Manufacturing Engineer Lead to own process development, DFM/DFA, and production readiness for the CG- series. This remains the highest-leverage hire in the company.
CG070204A-FNNCAP-XX-XX SN0033 unloaded spin. The code means something. The 07 is total number of 1/4" to the back of the circumscription of the outer rotor magnet array. You need only know the CG11- is bigger than the CG07-...
4."Big [Magnet] is infallible and all-powerful." - 1984, George Orwell, kinda
As you know from #005, our second largest investor directly relates us to the Critical Technologies Initiative of the U.S. Department of War. The ask: none. We're atop tightened sourcing rules under EO 14415. Should Big Magnet ever complicate things in a manner we didn't see coming, you won't have to wonder; I'll ask for help.
gratitude (to those who made last quarter possible)
Fasting and praying has been pretty rad in the consistency with which great things happen on Fridays, the day I fast (so shout out Jesus!). But tangibly also, thanks to:
- Mark Winchester, Elizabeth Charles, Valerie Maher, Winston Labbe & Dr. Tre Pennie (SBA): the Houston founder welcome committee. Network, generosity, the works. Thanks also to those you introduced us to already! Especially, Natalie G.,Winston L., Jeremy F., Ashlea Q., and Sable C. who continue to connect us to the right folks as we continue to grow;
- Andrew Winker, Will Cates, Hunter Harms, Luis Banuelos, Ethan Nichols, Edan Coben, Nick Glover, Shrikesh Sheshaprasad, Ed & Sam Jeon:especially Will and Andrew over the last 3 months for your friendship and thoughtful questions;
- Noah Fons & Naina Magon & Andrew Busker: Houston site selection heroes and helpers. I’ve never seen CenterPoint (or any utility) move like that;
- Jonas Miller, Emily Taylor, Pierre Crescimbeni, Amon Killeen, Chris Ferrari, Chris Caron, Gen (ret.) Jim Slife, and Cody Huggins:For your support sharing the good word (of the new gear that will set you free) in DC;
- John Mayo:for whom FluxWorkers made this video (oh, but thanks seriously for showing us around Apptronik all day the other day);
- Al White:(sounding like a broken record here) for your steady, refocusingmentorship and tactical advice on how & when to gather the right resources;
- Paul D'Amato, Nate George, and Brad Harrison: keeping the board meetings electric and providing specific and fruitful follow up introductions;
- Troy Johnson (BAE Systems): it is not possible to say "thank you" enough for keeping all parties rowing in the same direction through the stakeholder storm, and I know as Chief Engineer, you have many other things to do;
- Jenny Chiu: Fellow Forbes 30U30, for initiating and following through on hanging out with just my wife (and not inviting me); Chloe had tons-a-fun;
- Jamie ("Rhino") Rhone:for your precise/consistent government program contract management, guiding all stakeholders from messiness to a more unified and efficient vehicle;
Praxis crew (builders & give-back-ers):
Austin Browning and Birgitt Boschitsch for your active [near] weekly phone calls and texts, Anderson Petergeorge, Bianca Frezgi, Jen O'Neal, Catherine Illingworth — thank you (and s/o Greer) for the meal — Yohanes Frezgi [all pictured below], Glenn Bean (thank you and Katherine for sharing Napa wine), Rebekah Sood and Ariella Blank and Miesha Agrippa for hanging with team Praslicka and bailing on BottleRocket post conference. Thanks all of you for the shared notes, shared questions, and shared mission. And when I thought Mary Zhu's and my conversation with Andy Crouch about theology and AI was peak, Peter McGowan opening my eyes to how theologically sound KPop Demon Hunters is took the apologetics cake.
Praxis mentors:
Many more poured into me, but thank you especially for spending over an hour with me and providing advice I continue to ruminate on:
- Dave Evans: for your new book, illuminating take on Peter, and benefit of the doubt doodle that has saved me so much emotional energy and physical time;
- Kurt Keilhacker: for hitting me with the most piercing advice that in the moment was the best personal advice I felt I had ever been given, that as I continue to pray and ruminate on, hits deeper in a way that will certainly result in company growth (of the redemptive kind as well as in monetary value);
- Kevin Sproles: For the Nick K. introduction. It's the best lead we have for the herculean manufacturing challenges any company like ours has ahead;
- Dan Reed:For your exhortation of me re: transforming culture and the sourcing of capital partnerships accordingly while still energizing risk-forward;
- Solomon Wang: For the only Podcast recommendations I listen to besides Brad Jenkins recommendations that are tactically relevant to the business;
- Christine Gabriel and Morris Chen:for your representation re: real estate;
- Rachel Hulsey & Zach Samet: doors opened and hosting our offsite;
- Sherman Williams,Scott Key, Joe Meppelink, Jeff Kaplan: thoughtful partnership + clutch intros to the right people verylocally;
- Chloe Praslicka:oh how I am thankful to be dealt a great hand in marriage.
FluxWorks grows because people ask hard questions, and because you all let me hear the hard answers.
with nostalgia for when "binge-watching TV" was not in the vernacular, gratitude for every oneof you reading to this point, and thankfulness that the take – "Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are fussy" – unites & bonds even my politically divided family,
Bryton
P.S. in case you missed the reference in the first sentence of the newsletter...
