Almost every electric motor that matters today hides a dependency inside it: a permanent magnet made from rare earths dug up far away, refined elsewhere, and priced by a market India does not control. A Pune company has spent years engineering that dependency out of the motor altogether — and this autumn, its answer won its way to a global stage.
Gyrodrive’s magnet-free motor. Image: Gyrodrive Machineries.
Gyrodrive Machineries builds magnet-free electric motors and their controllers, designed and developed entirely in-house. Its answer to the rare-earth problem comes in two forms: switched reluctance motors (SRMs), which generate torque from steel and cleverly timed electromagnets rather than permanent magnets, and externally excited synchronous motors (EESMs) for low-voltage applications. Neither needs a gram of neodymium or dysprosium — the company says its motors carry a 0% requirement for hard-to-source rare earth minerals.
That matters far beyond the motor itself. The company points out that more than 90% of rare earth elements are imported, leaving Indian manufacturers exposed to price swings and supply shocks, while rare-earth mining itself carries a heavy environmental cost. Removing the magnet removes the choke point: supply becomes steadier, costs become more predictable, and the motor can be manufactured domestically from end to end.
The performance, the company says, does not come at the cost of efficiency. Its motors are built for high power and energy density, with efficiency matching the best in their class across the drive cycle, and its low-voltage EESM range reaches up to IE4-equivalent efficiency, operating at close to 94% efficiency at rated load, the company says. For a 300W appliance motor, switching to an EESM can save up to 15% energy over a year, according to the company. Across its range, the company claims up to 50% energy-cost savings, 30% less CO2, and 40% lower cost from eliminating costly rare-earth magnets.
More Read
Gyrodrive’s motors are made to go where motors already live. In electric vehicles, the company says its SRM drives deliver power-dense, high-torque performance across medium- and high-speed drive cycles, helping make EVs more affordable. In homes, its low-voltage motors — spanning 24V to 220V and 50W to 2kW for most consumer appliances — power washing machines, kitchen mixers, ceiling fans, vacuum cleaners and compact refrigeration compressors with constant torque across variable speeds up to 3,000 RPM, the company says. The same platform stretches into HVAC systems and industrial applications, where ruggedness and simple, robust construction matter most.
A second view of Gyrodrive’s magnet-free motor. Image: Gyrodrive Machineries.
Behind the hardware is an equally homegrown software layer: the company says it builds its own software for motor design, tuning and health prediction, and has added IoT capabilities for remote monitoring and predictive maintenance, so a motor can flag trouble before it causes downtime. That combination of motor, controller and intelligence is what lets vehicle makers customise drive behaviour to their own requirements instead of buying a sealed black box from abroad.
Gyrodrive Machineries was founded in 2018 by Eshan Dhar, its chief technology officer, whose background runs from a mechanical engineering degree at NIT Srinagar and a master’s at IISc Bengaluru to a stint as a scientific officer with the Department of Atomic Energy and research at Sandia National Laboratory in the United States. That deep motor-physics grounding, the company says, is what turned a research idea into a product line spanning vehicles, appliances and industry.
The wider world is starting to notice. Gyrodrive won the top honour at iCreate’s EVangelise ’22 challenge in the higher-readiness category, where Dhar said the company’s magnet-free switched reluctance motors could make India self-reliant in electric drive components while cutting costs by 40%. And on 29 September 2026, Gyrodrive was declared the winner of the Startup World Cup Pune Regional 2026 at the Sheraton Grand Pune, earning a place at the Startup World Cup Grand Finale in San Francisco, where it will represent Pune on a global stage.
It is a quietly radical idea: the most common machine in the modern world, rebuilt so it needs nothing scarce, nothing imported, and nothing that ties India’s factories to someone else’s mines. From an EV’s wheels to a kitchen mixer to a factory floor, Gyrodrive’s motors are proof that the road to cheaper, cleaner machines may run straight through Pune.
Keep reading: The Suitcase That Follows You: Inside Arista Vault, the Gurugram Startup Teaching Luggage to Walk, Ride and Guard Itself · The Factory Without Walls: Inside CapGrid, the Gurugram Startup Wiring India’s Spare Factory Capacity Into Precision Parts · More Industrial Automation & Technology stories
Like stories like this? Add Exceptional Technology as a preferred source on Google to see more of our reporting in your search results and Discover feed.
