Alva Industries raises €16M to scale its ultra-compact electric motors

Alva Industries has raised €16 million to scale production of its ultra-compact electric motors, the Trondheim based deep-tech company announced on 2 July.

The round is led by Nysnø Climate Investments, Sandwater and Emerald Technology Ventures, the latter investing on behalf of the Nabtesco Technology Ventures fund.

Existing backers Statkraft Ventures and EnvisionTech also took part. Samsung Ventures, which put a multi-million euro stake into Alva in December 2025 through its SVIC 47 New Technology Investment Partnership, has now converted that investment into shares as part of this round.

Alva’s pitch rests on FiberPrinting, a patented manufacturing process the company uses to weave conductive fibres into a motor’s stator rather than winding copper wire around a heavy iron core.

The result, according to Alva, is an ironless, slotless motor that is lighter than conventional designs, avoids the jerky low speed resistance known as cogging, and packs unusually high torque into a compact frame.

Those are exactly the properties that matter to engineers squeezing actuators into robotic hands, drone gimbals or surgical tools, a problem humanoid robot makers know well.

The company says it has hundreds of active customer projects running across commercial and defence markets, with growing traction among original equipment manufacturers in robotics, aerospace and medical devices.

Founded in 2017 by Jørgen P. Selnes, Sybolt L. Visser and Knut K. Nielsen, Alva has previously worked with names including Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and raised $11 million (NOK 117 million) in a 2023 Series A led by NRP Zero and Statkraft Ventures to scale into the industrial drone market. Oliver Skisland now leads the company as chief executive.

“Alva is on a mission to power a new generation of machines that are stronger, lighter, safer, and more reliable,” Skisland said in the announcement. “This investment gives us the capacity to accelerate our technology roadmap, expand production, and strengthen our position as a global supplier of high-performance electric motors.”

The new capital will fund expanded manufacturing capacity, continued development of Alva’s product line and international growth, the company said. Production currently sits in Norway, and Alva plans to significantly scale that capacity to meet demand it describes as accelerating across robotics, aerospace, medical devices and defence.

The investors’ framing leans heavily on category language. Morten E. Iversen, partner at Sandwater, said Alva “has the potential to become a category-defining company within high-performance electric motors”, while Nysnø chief executive Siri Kalvig pointed to the company’s ability “to build globally competitive industrial technology from Norway”.

Hiroshi Nerima, president and chief executive of Nabtesco Technology Ventures, said the FiberPrinting platform has “broad potential across robotics, automation, medical, aerospace, and other advanced industrial applications”, and flagged possible collaboration with Nabtesco Group’s OVALO on compact actuator systems.

The round lands inside a broader run of money moving into European hardware and deep tech, from data-centre infrastructure to dedicated early-stage funds built specifically to back it.

Nysnø itself is a repeat presence in that pipeline, as is the wider pool of Nordic funds, including NordicNinja, that have built portfolios around the region’s climate and deep-tech founders. What the announcement does not include is a post-money valuation or a breakdown of how the €16 million splits between the new lead investors and the existing backers who returned.

Alva also has not disclosed unit economics for its motors or a timeline for reaching the higher-volume production levels it says the funding will support.

For now, the company’s claims about torque density and cogging-free performance rest on its own technical materials rather than independent lab benchmarking.

Alva’s bet is that the same properties making its motors attractive to robotics OEMs today, low weight, high torque density, tight tolerances, will only become more valuable as humanoid robots, surgical robots and small satellites all compete for the same scarce space inside an actuator housing.