A consequential lesson Ben Schuler learned about machinery was measured in half a minute. Early in his career, working for Corning in Asia, he encountered a production line where shaving 30 seconds from a cycle could save $20 million in a year. A few ticks of the clock, repeated often enough, became a balance-sheet event. It was an industrial version of compound interest, only louder and surrounded by equipment.
That lesson followed him. Schuler spent 15 years leading the design and deployment of complicated automation across Taiwan, Japan and the United States. He worked around the production ramps for Corning's Gorilla Glass, Bloom Energy's solid-oxide fuel cells and Solyndra's thin-film solar modules. Factories taught him to look past the glamour of an invention and toward the repetitive middle: how it is made, what it consumes, where it slows, and what a small improvement becomes after the ten-thousandth cycle.
Eventually the object in front of him was the electric motor. It was not neglected. On the contrary, it was everywhere - moving air, pumping water, turning conveyors, cooling servers - and therefore easy to treat as settled. The familiar design wrapped copper wire around a laminated iron core. It worked. It was also heavy, material-hungry and frequently oversized for the job. Schuler wondered whether a machine this common could afford to remain ordinary.
A mathematician walks into a factory
Schuler studied mathematics at Oregon State University from 2000 to 2003 and played baseball there. He later studied business management at the University of Phoenix from 2006 to 2007. The pairing suits the company he eventually built: a motor is a practical machine governed by invisible relationships, while a factory is a practical place governed by unforgiving economics. Neither is improved by enthusiasm alone.
His early career added geography to that education. Designing automation in Taiwan and Japan meant working where production volumes expose every fragile assumption. Equipment has to repeat the same motion accurately, communicate with the systems around it and survive the inevitable difference between a drawing and a live floor. A design that saves space on paper but complicates assembly has merely moved the problem. A faster cycle that creates more failures has invented an expensive way to hurry.
This helps explain the shape of Schuler's later ambition. Infinitum would need an electromagnetic insight, but it would also need design-for-manufacture, software, controls, supply-chain judgment and customer support. Schuler's present remit covers company strategy, customer and market growth, technology direction, and organizational culture. The job is not simply to protect the original invention. It is to keep the surrounding system from wasting the advantage.
The generator that would not behave
The route to Infinitum began with another company. From 2013 to 2016, Schuler co-founded Fanergies, which pursued distributed energy generation for multifamily housing. In 2016 he was experimenting with recovering energy from residential HVAC systems. The generator was too large and too expensive. Trying to shrink it led him toward a printed-circuit-board stator, an approach that had appeared in specialized equipment but had not become a broad industrial platform.
A stator is the stationary part of a motor, the place where an electromagnetic field helps create rotation. Infinitum's version removes the iron laminations and wound-copper core, then etches copper conductors into a thin board. The result looks less like a dense bundle from a machine shop and more like something from an electronics bench. In axial-flux form, the magnetic field runs parallel to the shaft. Layers can be arranged to meet the application rather than forcing every application to accept the same blunt instrument.
Anatomy of the argument
Schuler founded Infinitum in Austin that year. He was an original creator of its air-core motor system and now holds 36 patents related to electric machines and drives. The number is impressive; the more useful detail is how the invention expanded. The company did not stop at swapping one component. It integrated a variable-frequency drive, built software and monitoring around the system, and made the motor modular enough to service and remanufacture.
“The future belongs to technologies that deliver more capability without demanding proportionally more resources.”Ben Schuler
Efficiency has an afterlife
Schuler's argument is broader than a percentage on a specification sheet. A conventional motor may be replaced when a bearing, drive or other component fails, sending useful material away with the broken part. Infinitum designed reusable components to remain in circulation. Its motors use no iron in the stator and, by the company's measure, 66 percent less copper. They can be sized to the horsepower, torque, speed and voltage the job actually needs.
Rightsizing sounds dull, which is often a compliment in engineering. Motors are frequently selected with extra capacity, a hedge that can waste electricity through years of partial-load operation. An integrated drive varies the output, while a custom rating avoids buying unused muscle in the first place. In a data center, the saved electrical headroom can be reassigned to computing equipment. In a commercial building, it can lower the running cost of fans and pumps. The motor remains backstage, but the arithmetic walks straight into the operating budget.
This is where the Corning lesson returns. One motor is incremental. A fleet, turning for thousands of hours across cooling and industrial systems, changes the scale of the result. Schuler has described the desired cumulative effect as astronomical. The word is unusually celestial for a machine that spends its life behind ductwork, but multiplication has always enjoyed theater.
Hardware meets the unromantic middle
A prototype can spin beautifully and still fail as a business. Motors must survive heat, dust, vibration, installers, procurement departments and maintenance schedules. They must ship at a cost that competes with incumbents carrying a century of factory knowledge. Schuler's automation background made manufacturing part of the product story from the beginning.
Infinitum introduced its first IEs systems in 2020. A $40 million Series C followed in 2021, led by Energy Innovation Capital, with Rockwell Automation taking an equity stake. In 2022, an $80 million Series D led by Riverstone Holdings pushed the company toward higher production; another $30 million arrived later that year. Then came a $185 million Series E in 2023, led by Just Climate, and a $35 million extension in 2024. The financing paid for a very physical ambition: people, tooling, automation and factories.
Its manufacturing footprint grew from Tijuana to a second facility in Saltillo. Schuler has called the repeatable factory approach “cut and paste,” a phrase that makes heavy equipment sound as agreeable as a keyboard shortcut. The Saltillo operation was designed with natural light, water reuse, motor-energy recapture during testing and a native-plant nursery. Sustainability, in this telling, belongs in the process as well as the brochure.
There is a less corporate laboratory too. Infinitum's biography notes that weekends can find Schuler conducting water-balloon experiments with his children, with wet footprints as the published result. It is a charmingly low-stakes counterpoint to reliability testing. The instinct is recognizably the same: make something, release it, observe the consequences, and accept that the floor may need attention.
Ten years into the next century
By 2024, Bloomberg Businessweek had named Schuler among its inaugural Green Ones to Watch. In 2025, Fast Company ranked Infinitum nineteenth on its World's 50 Most Innovative Companies list and first in the energy category. Austin's regional manufacturing association gave the Aircore system its Coolest Thing Made in Austin award. The trophies recognized a company moving from clever architecture toward visible industrial adoption.
Infinitum marked its tenth anniversary in 2026 by widening the system again. At the AHR Expo in February, it introduced EC Fan Systems that combine the fan, motor and drive for cooling and industrial work. In June it announced Aircore EC+, adding integrated active-front-end technology intended to manage harmonics where power quality matters. The company was no longer merely offering a different stator. It was organizing the equipment around how facilities use and conserve power.
Find a tiny, repeated waste inside a huge installed system. Then redesign the materials, controls, manufacturing and maintenance around removing it. A better component becomes more defensible when it improves the whole lifecycle.
Schuler's stated aspiration has stayed consistent: move motors into an era that asks for less energy, fewer critical materials and less waste. The applications have narrowed toward the places where that economy is easiest to measure - HVAC, data-center cooling, pumps and industrial air movement. The romance lies less in inventing an object the world has never seen than in studying a familiar one until its compromises become impossible to ignore.
An old machine does not become obsolete merely because a new one arrives. It becomes debatable. Schuler's work has made the electric motor debatable again: how much iron it needs, how copper should be arranged, how closely it should match the load, whether it deserves repair, and what its owner is really buying when the shaft begins to turn. Those questions are still spinning. That is the point.