 Welcome back to Keeping Up With The Fluxersthe newsletter chronicling our mission-driven, core value-guided company journey, where you can enjoy isosteric gear jokes ad-free at any subscription tier (and you don't have to pretend to like golf to hang). Previously on this show: I told you Sept. 30 would collapse every scenario into one. Dear reader, funding-wise, it did. What's next is where and how to scale manufacturing. [cue theme music, title card…]
Happy birthday, FluxWorks (Oct. 4)! Culture Crew scheduled FLUX FEST (their name and idea, but I like it) for Oct. 16, October's Fluxy Friday (also their coinage). More later. tl;dr●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● 1 of 15 Fasting rhythmically. Acts 13 shows fasting leading to hearing the Spirit more clearly and to wisdom on how to execute, and Isaiah 58 shows that the Lord's heart for fasting is, in part, to keep me from being a tool. My mind is sooo clear from the lack of food. FEAST THINE EYES:
The Army posted it before we did. On X here; tap the image for LinkedIn.
Not my kitchen anymore: the team, assembled.
Me, pitching. Smooth as butta. Site selection continues. life (high / low / water buffalo)●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● 2 of 15
Running in places with hills. Revolutionary, for a Houston resident.
The FluxWorks OKR wall, projected 24/7: it pulls from ClickUp every 15 minutes, shows company events from our shared calendars, and stars 900+ animations of Gary Gear, who writes context-aware jokes ("almost waterproof" during a storm had engineers belly-laughing). what does fluxworks do?●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● 3 of 15 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 it, the CG- series gear. Later, the CGM- series actuator (a CG- series gear with motor and encoder) will drop. Learn more about our core technologies here. Links to follow our socials are in the footer. Jump to the footer ↓ fundraising (raising dough)●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● 4 of 15
Me, doing the gear thingy, immortalized as a .gif. S/O Birgitt (see thanks below). The full talk is here, ICYMI in #007. FluxWorks is raising a Strategic Growth round, a priced equity round of trusted venture capital. The first wave went out Sept. 16 to roughly forty investors, and I'm grateful for the rapid answers, from an immediate "no, and here's why" to a new partner whose wire hit our account Sept. 24 on a SAFE (thank you!). We're still looking for a lead for the priced round, and we think we may have found one. The thesis is simple. Every robot runs on precision gear-motors, most of them are made overseas, and we make a first-of-its-kind one here: Celestial Gear™ and Lodestar™ give our actuators torque transparency nobody else can offer. The new wave of American motor companies are wins, not competitors. Our gears pop onto any motor today, so every new U.S. motor line is a future customer or partner. The round alone takes CG- manufacturing to repeatable, scaled commercial sales. If the Army follows through on its match (Public Law 119-83), the same dollars also pull a second product line forward for defense. Either way, the money goes into the factory. To learn more, reply to this email or grab the deck and pass it on.
The Strategic Growth deck, all 10 slides. Tap it for the PDF. the first strategic breakthrough award in the country (government cheese)●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● 5 of 15 $3.5M, executed Aug. 25, 2026. Co-funded by OSW (R&E) ART and DEVCOM GVSC, and executed by the Army FUZE office. Congress requires 90 days from proposal to signature; the Army did it in 41. Of the $30M eligible for match, $12.5M of program funding is in our FY27–FY28 DoW pipeline, and this round goes after the first private tranche; how that works is in what is freaking me out.
The Strategery for the U.S. Army Strategic Breakthrough Contract. What it's building: mostly manufacturing scale-up for our first catalog product lines, the Celestial Gear™ CG- gear series and the Lodestar™ CGM- actuator series, right here in the U.S. of America. Part of it also goes to the big chungus the U.S. Army wants for future UGVs.
The big chungus, mid-build, that GVSC is jonesin' for. Grammar note: the plural is "big chungi," which matters, because the plan calls for four big chungi per vehicle. everest, two routes up (moon cheese)●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● 6 of 15 Non-dilutive just hit its oxygen check. The commercial climb is happening either way, and the round pays for it. Government funding is extra oxygen: if the Army commits and follows through, we summit faster with a second route through defense and space. If it doesn't, we keep climbing commercially at the same pace.
NASA Phase III, NASA Phase II-E, and the Army's word for what it is all for. Lockheed Martin's Mentor-Protégé news lives on X and Instagram.
How we decide is in what is freaking me out ↓. One more thing: DoW pronounces "SBIR" as a word, while every other agency spells it out, "S-B-I-R." Hence the eternal "a SBIR" vs. "an SBIR" debate. Just write "the SBIR." team 🧑🔧 (not my kitchen anymore)●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● 7 of 15 IF YOU TAKE AWAY ONE THING FROM THIS NEWSLETTER: for maybe the first time, nearly the whole team is aligned on making great gears, repeatably, at scale. Alex Lee brought OKRs, Hayden owns them (superstar of the month), and Culture Crew preaches them door to door. When Alex floated humanoids, the company pushed back: delta robots first. I have never been prouder to be shouted down. I agree, which is why our model makes licensing attractive on the humanoid path, one Alex and team are exploring now.
Culture Crew's balloons.
The official palette. The balloons went four for six. Let's go make great gears. Culture Crew. Gennesis started it while we made rotors side by side: mechanic jumpsuits, a patch economy, De La Soul to open meetings, and me as core-value navigator, pointing to our patron saint, Fani Flux. It's hers. The crew has already transformed our interview and onboarding processes, and once showed up with balloons suspiciously close to our brand color. My coveralls came in too, and steel toes plus safety glasses are now a grassroots thing.
The pose. A joke now, and still the fastest way to explain what we do. Spot the third Shiner in this letter below. We drank it at work exactly once, and now it's a motif. So is the "all-expenses-paid trip to Chili's" on the core value prize wheel (a $50 gift card).
Game night, with Micah's favorite still up first and Mary looking photoshopped into her own game night (twice). On the right: the official review, and a mid-workday text. Goodbyes count too. We sing happy birthday on first days and last days. At Marissa's farewell lunch, the waiter really thought it was her birthday.
Not her birthday. financial snapshot (yes chef)●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● 8 of 15 · halfway, hydrate Numbers and colored triangles, as is tradition: green is good. August against August this time, because the raise is live and waiting for the Q3 close felt silly. ▲ Revenue (August YoY): $415.9K vs. $110.1K [▲277.7%] ▲ Net Income (August YoY): +$97.5K vs. −$334.2K [▲$431.8K] (one month, not a trend) ▲ Revenue (YTD YoY): $1.97M vs. $1.14M [▲73%] ▼ Monthly Average Net Burn (YTD YoY): $74.3K vs. $77.7K [▼4.4%] ▲ Cash (Aug. 31 YoY): $3.39M vs. $3.25M [▲4.3%]
The finance team (of one).
CY26 revenue forecast as stated in #006, #007 and today. commercialization (taste test)●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● 9 of 15 Introducing the #1 Agentic AI gearbox. Just kidding.
Every networking event this quarter. Inspiration shamelessly stolen from this reel. What actually happened: our torque-transparent BLDC actuators start in industrial automation through Rockwell, land first on Douglas and Aagard systems, then go to everyone else building delta and SCARA robots, and one design covers all of them. So we told Douglas and Aagard to wait for their CG11- units while their Gen. Beta feedback and Rockwell's reshape that design. Alex Lee, our CSO, braced for disappointment and got the opposite: they were thrilled, and Douglas now wants delta as well as SCARA. Turns out people value honesty over overclaiming.
The first automated magnet inserter, more consistent every run. Its 3D-printed rotors survive only a few runs, which is what the round is for: great robots, making great gears. HECK YA, GEARSSSS. What's that colorful doohickey? It punches magnets into our rotor molds, which we can now make here or outsource.
In-house and outsourced, both keep getting better. We still run a blend, and as an AS9100D/ISO 9001-certified company, we make sure both are yummy. Today, in Conroe, we can make 1,600–2,000 rotors a year, in-house plus a nearly validated outside supplier: enough for 200–250 CG11 gearboxes. At our next facility, the goal is the kind of scale that makes Rockwell say, "Oh, yeah, that could be a technology partner." We think that means 60,000 a year, minimum, which isn't that crazy for 4″ and 6″ aluminum cylinders when robots punch in the magnets and everything else is COTS.
CG110384A-FNNCAP-XX-XX SN45 running a pre-programmed cycle to mimic the customer load profile for days, with what is assumed to be a post-test Shiner supervising. Tap for the clip. Delaying launch also gives us time to get the Orioles Orange anodization right, previewed in this graphic my hot wife made for us. Every company is blue; an orange gear stands out. And if we move to Houston, let the record show our official orange, #FB5012, is not Orioles Orange (#FF8C00) but Astros orange (#EB6E1F). ⚾
Alive only in this newsletter: the orange is a render, and Gen. 01's shaft and housing change a touch to fit more machines. Goodbye, beautiful graphic! what is freaking me out (reservations pending)●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● 10 of 15 We are at a government crossroads. Alignment is going amazingly (see Team and the non-dilutive above). With the private raise alone, we can commercialize and become a big company with a solid exit and real market comps. If government goes eight digits, we could become a humongous one. Big vs. humongous is a good problem to have, and the next 12 months decide it.
Two routes up the same mountain. The gear does not care. The silly part: the government spec keeps changing, and we don't really need it anymore. "Non-dilutive buys runway" stopped being a reason: we have more than three years of runway after our next facility expansion, even if we decline every current FY27 government opportunity, under our current commercialization cost assumptions. One engineer runs the whole Army program and one runs all of space, which is about the speed of government; going faster takes more capital and real buy-in. The other 13 of us stay focused on commercial. So, the deal: invest, and we crush it commercially. If the Army brings its match, it's a win-win-win: you get more manufacturing out of every dollar plus a second product line in development, and OSW, which funds Army DEVCOM GVSC's program, gets nearly 2x its $1.75M Year 2 investment in work, all toward a product for the warfighter, not just in the Army but jointly. All they have to do is commit the money, keep the spec still, and let the primes drive. Otherwise, with love:
Back to the one thing: CG- manufacturing for scaled, repeatable sales. We have nearly everything we need, and both outcomes are good ones. Hop aboard. The round is here ↑ learnings since last time●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● 11 of 15 It is not your last chance to creatively express yourself. One line from a Praxis mentor changed how I look at work, and it has made me better at knowing when to speak as a leader and when not to. Sometimes the move is to do nothing. Culture Crew's charter (To Guard and Amplify the Core Values, their words) is a good one, and when they stick to it, the right move for me is often:
All hail the magic conch!! ALOULOULOULOU!!! Going amazingly: Engineering talks to Sales & Marketing, and vice versa. Went poorly: I wrote that nearly the whole team is aligned. The gap is all of us, me included, creatively self-expressing at the expense of focus: software for a problem we don't have (for one brief month, you would think that FluxWorker was striving to become a B2B SaaS company), side quests into other revenue streams that involved too many people at such an exploratory stage, and, most recently, taking SkillBridge training so seriously you'd mistake it for a technical college.
Gary Gear, supervising quality inspection. No formal authority. Does not need it. So this SkillBridge is less a test of the veteran and more a test of whether their supervisor can lead people and keep the focus on making great gears. Medium: a delayed hub-drive demonstrator showed that vendor management is becoming a big deal. Good news: last Monday, a manufacturing engineer whose job includes managing vendors started. what i feel good about●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● 12 of 15 The formal Praxis Fellowship ended. It started back in #005, and three things came out of it: the next five years of this company are far more ironed out; I have a working perspective on being a prophet of a future that is not my own (democratize robotics and automation to empower every builder, one OKR at a time); and I learned FluxWorks is not my last chance to creatively express myself, which turned handing my people the torch into a gift instead of a loss. I also made friends and new investors along the way.
San Diego, the night before a run: breaking a three-day fast with a Corona (fine) and one sip of wine (spiraling). My Czech ancestors are proud. The final Praxis dinner: so, so sweet. Back at the farm, Culture Crew members, before the Crew formally existed, made Marissa (see #007) goodbye gifts. The other FluxWorker, who had to urgently resign to become a caretaker and move their family back to Florida, was sent care packages and flowers: I found out when I was asked to sign the card. All enduringly good things, IMO.
All homemade. Nobody asked them to. We have a new website ready. Professionals made it, and we switch when the product launches. In the meantime, the interim site lists the team alphabetically, successfully removing the center of gravity off me. what's next●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● 13 of 15 Next 90 days: close the Strategic Growth round. Not manufactured urgency. We're asking the Army to match just before Christmas, because our champion retires in May and because we'd rather have the match locked in before the economy does whatever it's going to do. A nice thing about a CPG delta-robot beachhead: people buy groceries in good times and bad. The whole company is going to PACK EXPO. Not a booth crew. Everyone. To learn and to ask questions.
Me at The Gathering. At PACK EXPO there's no booth: we're there to learn, and to stay laser-focused on gears. Deciding between facilities. Texas and Virginia are both real processes. Expect the answer in Powertrain #010: the incentive process takes longer than writing #009, and we aren't going anywhere without incentives. In Virginia, we covered this much in 36 hours (since you asked, h*ck yeah I planned my visit around Gauley Fest, the best white-water rafting event).
Virginia, 36 hours.
Touring Virginia facilities. Space, in May. The launch slipped to May, and that's fine: the Gen. Alpha actuator (the flyer) passed CDR Sept. 30, and the Gen. Beta with Lodestar™ is mid vibe test. Partners and the government pay for the ride, so space stays on autopilot until a committed pipeline says boldly go.
Gen. Beta, mid vibe test. Tap for the clip. Also next: SAFE checks and incentive decisions. Also also: KPop Demon Hunters, for the third time. what we need help with●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● 14 of 15 Huddle up and take a knee. Actually, sit criss-cross-applesauce so you can hear me better. FluxWorks does not need customer introductions.
Asked politely since #005. We sell gears. At our last trade show, Alex opened with "We make magnetic gears" or "We make magnetically geared actuators," depending on who walked up, and each person paused, then said, "WHOA." That's how we got our three pilots. Now we talk to no one else (no datasheets or inquiry form, on purpose), because serving those three well will take a while. After that, Alex has a long list for the same line and a new website to go with it. So, with love and real thanks: no intros to random companies that use motors and gears. The strategic investors we want for our next equity event, though? Yes, please.
That's Hayden, not the new hire. Still reading captions? Then you caught the hydrate break at 8 of 15. Well done, little Powertrain engine that could, and thank you for chugging through this together. What we do need:
gratitude (to those who made last quarter possible)●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● 15 of 15 Fasting and praying continue to be rad in the consistency with which good things happen. But tangibly, thank you to:
Ross and me.
Me, two hours before the deadline.
The watch. Front, and the back. I have not taken it off.
Lodestar™, first motion on the drill axis, at 4x speed. Thank you, Texas Space Commission. And to friends:
Andrew, Marie and little LJ.
Austin Hill and me.
My dad and me, one fence later.
Friends. The best kind of board meeting.
sign-offEating, drinking and delighting in the toil (work on earth is toil), hoping for the toil-free work of heaven, with clarity that all work is just bringing order to God's creation, and with more run-on sentences than you can count, Bryton Follow along: LinkedIn · X · Instagram The Powertrain is the FluxWorks investor and partner letter. Every issue lives at the archive. FluxWorks, Inc. · 1026 Outpost Dr Suite B1, Conroe, TX 77304 Don't want the Powertrain? Reply with “unsubscribe” and you're off the list. |
