The Pulse
Atomic Machines Unveils Its Matter Compiler After Six Years in Stealth
Atomic Machines has introduced the Matter Compiler, an AI-native system designed to make working micro-machines from digital designs. Its first product, the PrimeSwitch relay, is shipping to early-access customers for evaluation.
AI.info Team · Written with AI ·
Atomic Machines says its Matter Compiler can make working micro-machines from digital designs, but its first public result is a single product: a relay now being sent to early-access customers for evaluation. The Emeryville, California, company introduced the system on October 7 after six years in stealth, describing a factory that can design, build and measure devices without product-specific masks or retooling. The gap between that broad manufacturing claim and one device still in evaluation is the launch’s central test.
A factory that changes with the design
The Matter Compiler is not a new semiconductor chipmaking process. Atomic Machines pitches it as a way to build small, three-dimensional machines with moving parts and multiple materials—devices conventional chip fabs, built around flat silicon circuits, are not designed to produce. The company says the system runs manufacturing operations from digital instructions, measures each build and feeds what it learns into later designs.
On its Matter Compiler page, Atomic Machines describes a system that designs, builds and measures a device, with each iteration changing in software rather than requiring a production line to be retooled. The stated target includes devices that move, pump, manage heat or manipulate light, as well as mechanical components at scales where conventional tools reach their limits. Those capabilities are the company’s description of its system; the launch materials do not present independent test results or production data for a range of devices.
PrimeSwitch puts the claim on a product
The first device is PrimeSwitch PS-150, an electromechanical relay aimed at power systems, including the 800-volt direct-current infrastructure being adopted for AI data centers. Atomic Machines says it opens in 50 microseconds, carries 150 amps continuously and provides 1,500 volts of galvanic isolation. Its listed dimensions are 9.5 millimeters across and 3 millimeters thick, and the company says the bistable device holds its state without power.
The relay is designed around a trade-off between conventional mechanical switches, which conduct through metal but open more slowly, and solid-state switches, which can open quickly but dissipate heat while conducting. Atomic Machines says PrimeSwitch combines metal-to-metal conduction with microsecond opening. The company’s product page lists the device as sampling now; the launch announcement says it is shipping to early-access customers for evaluation, not that it has reached broad commercial production.
$250 million raised to date
Atomic Machines said it has raised $250 million to date, a cumulative figure rather than a newly announced financing round. The investors it named include OneIM, Gigafund, XTX Ventures, KAS Venture Partners, Valor Equity Partners, Tru Arrow Partners, Construct Capital, Sozo Ventures and the Regents of the University of California. The company did not disclose a valuation in the announcement.
Founder and chief executive Jeff Holden framed the system as a platform whose value should extend beyond its first relay. “PrimeSwitch matters. But the machine matters more, because a language is defined by everything it can say, not by its first sentence,” Holden wrote in his account of the company’s origins.
The next test is repeatable manufacturing
One device can show that the company has produced a working micro-machine; it cannot by itself establish that the same system can make many different devices reliably, or at commercial volume. Atomic Machines argues that its approach can avoid the bespoke process development that has made each new class of micro-device slow to manufacture. Its public materials, however, do not yet report production capacity, repeatability across multiple designs or independent verification of the system’s broader claims.
The company planned to show PrimeSwitch publicly at the Open Compute Project Global Summit in San Jose, scheduled for October 12–15. For now, the concrete evidence is narrower: a named relay with published specifications, available as an evaluation sample, and a manufacturing platform whose wider reach remains to be demonstrated.