Trondheim's Alva Industries raises €16 million to scale electric motors built without copper windings

Trondheim-based Alva Industries has raised €16 million to scale its FiberPrinted electric motors — drives built by weaving conductive fibres directly into a composite stator structure, bypassing the copper windings and iron cores that have defined how motors are built since the 19th century. The round was co-led by Nysnø Climate Investments, Sandwater, and Emerald Technology Ventures (investing on behalf of Nabtesco Technology Ventures). Existing backers Statkraft Ventures and EnvisionTech followed on. Samsung Ventures, which first took a position in Alva in December 2025, converted that stake into equity as part of this close rather than participating as a new investor.

Rewriting the motor's geometry

The problem Alva is working on is architectural. The conventional electric motor — in use essentially unchanged since the 1880s — creates a rotating magnetic field by energising copper coils wound around an iron stator. The design works, but copper and iron are heavy, the winding process is labour-intensive, and the resulting motor tends to be larger than strictly necessary for the torque it produces. For most industrial applications, those trade-offs are acceptable. For robotics, aerospace and implantable medical devices, they are not.

Founded in 2017 in Trondheim, Alva's answer is a process it calls FiberPrinting: conductive fibres are woven directly into a lightweight composite stator structure, eliminating the iron core and replacing copper winding with a fundamentally different construction method. The company says the result is motors that are dramatically more compact and lighter than equivalents of the same output — the characteristics that matter most in a legged robot, a compact aircraft or a surgical end-effector where every gram and millimetre is accounted for.

What the investor line-up signals

The capital will go to expanding manufacturing capacity in Trondheim, broadening the product portfolio, and accelerating international growth. The investor composition tells its own story. Nysnø Climate Investments is Norway's state climate fund, bringing both capital and a sovereign mandate for domestic deep-tech manufacturing. Sandwater focuses on deep-tech and industrial technology. Emerald Technology Ventures, acting for Nabtesco Technology Ventures, connects Alva directly to the Japanese precision-engineering sector — one of the most demanding end-markets for high-performance actuators. Statkraft Ventures and EnvisionTech continuing signals that existing investors remain convinced the thesis holds.

The most precise data point in the round, though, is Samsung Ventures converting its December 2025 stake. A corporate venture arm that converts an early position — rather than waiting for a new priced round to decide — has weighed the technology against its own product roadmap and decided to hold equity rather than optionality. Samsung builds electronics and devices that could plausibly use Alva's motors at scale; the conversion is a signal of unusual specificity. Whether FiberPrinting delivers its claimed performance without degradation at commercial volumes is the question the new capital is designed to answer.