Atomic Machines emerges with $250M to build micro-machines

Atomic Machines, a Bay Area startup led by former Amazon and Uber executive Jeff Holden, came out of six years in stealth on October 7, 2026, with $250 million raised. It builds tiny machines directly from code, using a system it calls the Matter Compiler. Its first product is PrimeSwitch, a power relay for AI data centers that the company says opens about 1,000 times faster than a conventional switch.

What the Matter Compiler does

The company's announcement, distributed through Business Wire, calls the Matter Compiler a general-purpose, AI-native, all-digital manufacturing system. It builds working three-dimensional machines from code. Those machines can have moving parts, several materials and assembled subsystems, with features as small as single-digit microns. A micron is a thousandth of a millimeter.

The system needs no hard tooling. Factories usually make small parts with molds or masks built for one design. Instead, the Matter Compiler measures every step and corrects it in real time, and its AI runs its own experiments on the hardware, the release says. TNW reports the company's view that conventional manufacturing hits its limits at a few tens of microns.

The name comes from a machine in Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age, TNW notes. Holden compares the system to the ribosome, the part of a living cell that builds proteins from genetic instructions. "3D printing made shapes programmable: any geometry, straight from a file. We're making machines programmable," Holden said, according to TNW.

The company's targets go well beyond switches. The release names motors and gears the size of a grain of sand, robots small enough to work inside the body, and cooling built into AI chips.

PrimeSwitch, the first product

PrimeSwitch PS-150 is a bistable electromechanical power relay. Bistable means it stays in either position without power to hold it there. It is built for hybrid circuit breakers with a solid-state bypass, in the 800-volt direct-current power systems of AI data centers.

Spec	PrimeSwitch PS-150
Opening time	50 microseconds
Speed versus a conventional contactor	About 1,000 times faster
Continuous current	150 amps
On-resistance	200 micro-ohms
Galvanic isolation	1,500 volts
Size	9.5mm across, 3mm thick

All of these figures come from the company's release. TNW notes that conventional contactors take milliseconds to switch. A breaker that opens faster can cut off a fault sooner.

PrimeSwitch is shipping to early-access customers for evaluation, though none are named. Its first public showing is at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit in San Jose, October 12-15. The company's website calls it "The first micro-machine out of the Matter Compiler."

The money and the people

Detail	Figure
Raised	$250 million to date
Investors	OneIM, Gigafund, XTX Ventures, KAS Venture Partners, Valor Equity Partners, Tru Arrow Partners, Construct Capital, Sozo Ventures, Regents of the University of California
Time in stealth	Six years
Offices	Emeryville and Santa Clara, California

The release says the $250 million was raised "to date," a cumulative total rather than one round. It gives no valuation and no breakdown by round.

Holden joined Amazon as its tenth engineer, helped build Amazon Prime and rose to senior vice president. He then became Uber's first chief product officer and founded its self-driving, AI labs and air-taxi divisions.

Gigafund managing partner Luke Nosek put the pitch in software terms: "If vibe coding is how software gets made now, this is the start of vibe manufacturing."

What this means for developers

• Data center teams: watch the OCP demo. If you design or buy power systems for 800-volt DC racks, the San Jose summit is the first public look at PrimeSwitch. Ask for independent test data, since every spec so far comes from the company.
• Read "manufacturing from code" as a software story. If the Matter Compiler works as described, hardware design starts to look like a build pipeline: change a file, get a new part. Engineers who already script CAD or simulation work are closest to that workflow.
• Separate the product from the platform. PrimeSwitch is one component with published specs. The bigger claims, such as gears the size of a grain of sand and robots inside the body, have no shipping product yet.
• Note what is missing. No customers, valuation or production volumes are public. Those numbers will show whether Atomic Machines runs a factory or a lab.