Turntide Technologies has been selected for a £17m UK government grant to scale up production of its axial flux electric motors at its Gateshead campus.

The money, called Project SUPREME, comes through the government's DRIVE35 Scale-up Fund, administered by the Advanced Propulsion Centre UK and Innovate UK as part of a wider £4bn programme for automotive electrification.

Turntide's US parent arrived in the North East in 2021, acquiring BorgWarner's Gateshead technical centre, a power electronics site with roots going back several decades under its earlier name, Sevcon, along with Hyperdrive Innovation, a Sunderland battery specialist.

Turntide's backers are reported to include Bill Gates and Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund. By 2025 the company had consolidated its North East sites into a single engineering campus in Gateshead, commissioned by North East mayor Kim McGuinness. Turntide and APC UK describe the £17m as matched funding, though neither has said what share is public money and what share Turntide is putting in itself.

Over the 18-month project, running to January 2028, the money will automate the labour-intensive parts of building axial flux motors, winding coils and tooling components by hand, so Turntide can validate the technology for higher-volume manufacture.

Axial flux motors can deliver more power from a smaller, lighter unit than conventional radial flux designs used in most electric vehicles today, but have historically been harder to build at scale, which is the specific problem this grant is meant to solve.

The award arrives five days after Advanced Electric Machines, the Newcastle University spinout, closed its own £16m funding round for a different generation of rare-earth-free motor technology in Washington.

The two companies are taking different routes into the same industry: one commercialising university research from scratch, the other building on the region's existing engineering base.