Maglev

Scalemanufacturingwith us

We take a hardware team from a frozen design to units landed at your door: factory match, tooling, quality control on the ground, certification, customs, and delivery. One team the whole way, in Shenzhen and the Greater Bay Area.

What we handle, in order

01

Factory match

We profile your product by its real processes, tolerances and volume, then route it to factories that fit. We have profiled more than 500 manufacturers across Guangdong and the Yangtze Delta, and we asked them ourselves, one by one.

02

Quote and tooling

Unit cost, minimum order, lead time, and tooling terms with mold ownership written in your favour so you can move factories later. At this volume aluminium bridge tooling costs a fraction of steel and outlasts what you need.

03

Production and quality control

Someone on the ground for first article and again during the run, on your side of the table. Component substitution without notice is the most common reason a second batch quietly stops matching the first.

04

Certification

FCC, RoHS, and UN38.3 for anything with a lithium cell, with documentation that matches the exact part you shipped. A model number that does not match the report on file is the ordinary reason a shipment sits at a border.

05

Customs and classification

Your commodity code sets your duty rate, and the same product can land far apart depending on how it is classified. A binding ruling from US Customs costs nothing and takes 30 to 90 days. We get one before your run, not after.

06

Freight and delivery

Air or ocean, consolidation, a customs broker who has cleared hardware before, and units at your address.

Your files stay yours

We match on your specifications, not your geometry. Process, material, tolerance class, volume and finish are enough to shortlist a factory, and that is all we need to start.

When files do move, they go to the shortlisted factory under a Chinese language agreement covering non disclosure, non use and non circumvention, enforceable in a Chinese court. A translated Western NDA is close to worthless there, and we do not pretend otherwise.

We do not train anything on your designs. The only thing we keep is our own record of which factory quoted what and delivered when. That is ours. Your product is not.

Who this is for

Volume
50 to 500 units, first or second production batch.
Product
Tabletop robots, robot subassemblies, sensors, lab instruments, consumer and prosumer devices. Anything with an enclosure, a board and moving parts.
Stage
Funded, with a design close to frozen.
Location
Your team can be anywhere. Our customs and certification depth is strongest into the United States.
Not a fit
Defense and export controlled products, which cannot lawfully be built in China. Medical devices carrying a heavy regulatory burden. Anything already running at ten thousand units, where you no longer need us.

Q&A

Are you a broker, a trading company, or a manufacturer?

None of the three. We do not own a factory, and we do not buy your product and resell it to you. We match your design to a factory that already makes things like it, and we manage the process on your side of the table from quote through delivery.

Do you mark up the factory's price?

No. You see the factory's number and you pay the factory's number. Our fee is charged to you, separately and visibly, for the work we do.

Will my design get stolen, by the factory or by you?

This is the real risk in this industry and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Any factory that sees your files does so under a Chinese language agreement covering non disclosure, non use and non circumvention, enforceable in a Chinese court. We also limit how much of the complete product any single supplier sees at once, the same discipline a factory uses internally to protect its own process secrets.

Worth knowing what the actual risk looks like: the common failure is not file theft, it is a contract that does not stop your factory from running extra units, or a competitor copying your product from your own launch photos. Both are addressable, and neither is what most founders worry about.

What does this cost?

It depends on your product, so we will not invent a number. Send a bill of materials and rough specs and we will come back with a real quote, no charge and no obligation either way. You will see the factory price and our fee as two separate lines.

What if something goes wrong? A bad batch, a missed date, a factory that goes quiet.

We escalate directly, in Chinese, through the factory's own management chain rather than a ticket system. Final payment is not released until first article and production units have passed inspection on the ground. If a factory misses, that goes into our record of them, which is the same record we use to decide who to send the next job to.

Why not use Xometry, Fictiv, or another instant quote platform?

Those platforms are excellent at quoting a single process, a CNC part or a molded shell, at prototype scale. Your product is an assembly: an enclosure, a board, moving parts, maybe a battery. Getting that built at 50 to 500 units means coordinating factory match, tooling, quality control, certification and customs as one relationship rather than five quotes you stitch together yourself. If a single process instant quote is what you need, use one of them.

Why not go to the factory myself?

Sometimes you should, and we will tell you so. If you have sourced before, know the category, and are placing a repeat order with a factory you trust, go direct. Where we earn our fee is the harder case: a first production run, a design not yet frozen into something a factory can quote cleanly, and one shot to get it right.

What if part of this is outside what you know?

We will tell you where our depth ends rather than guess. Our customs and certification knowledge is strongest into the United States. For the EU and UK we can source and run production, but we bring in a specialist for CE and UKCA. Defense and export controlled products cannot lawfully be manufactured in China at all, and heavy regulatory medical devices are not a fit for us.

How involved do I need to be?

Less than doing it yourself, more than zero. You approve a real quote, you sign off a first article sample before the full run starts, and you get updates during production. Not a black box that resurfaces six weeks later with a container.

Why Shenzhen and not somewhere else?

Because at this volume nowhere else is close. Shenzhen and Dongguan are the only metro loop where PCB fab, assembly, CNC, molding, sheet metal, motors, connectors, finishing and final assembly all sit within a commute of each other, which is what makes a one week iteration loop possible instead of a one month one. Vietnam works for simple assembly, Mexico for final box build of an already sourced product. At 50 to 500 units, neither is a real substitute yet.

Get in touch

Tell us what you are building. Send a bill of materials and we will come back with what your run would actually cost and how long it would take, free either way.