About Us

Founded in 2010, we are a stereotypical group of San Francisco foodies and engineers with decades of robotics experience. In the past five years, we have solved many difficult engineering and manufacturing challenges, learned about helping each other grow, and produced a plethora of interesting intellectual property. Our various technologies can produce an ever-growing list of common choices like salads, sandwiches, hamburgers, and many other multi-ingredient foods with a gourmet focus.

Please email us if you share our passion and would like to:

Early Adopters: hop onto our mailing list to use our technology.

products@momentummachines.com

Smart Creatives: express yourself. Momentum is designed to make you shine.

join@momentummachines.com

https://jobs.lever.co/momentummachines

The Insightful: reach out and say hello. We’d love to hear your advice.

hello@momentummachines.com

Our Team

Momentum’s highest priority is building an engineering focused assemblage of analytic and creative individuals. This team includes wonderful advisers, consultants, investors, interns, laborers, and engineers. Presented below is the leadership of that group, people who live to help oncoming members blossom.

Michael Balsamo

Above all Michael enjoys tackling challenging engineering problems. He joins Momentum from Tesla Motors, where he was the powertrain team’s lead transmission engineer, and his design set the quietness benchmark for EV transmissions. Prior to Tesla, he was a design engineer at GM. In his free time Michael coaches Stanford’s yearlong design practicum course. Michael is a licensed professional engineer and has an MS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated cum laude.

Aaron Engel-Hall

Inventor, Dreamer, and Night-owl. A relentless tinkerer, Aaron is fascinated with the creative and pursues the yet unimagined. Before Momentum he worked in R&D as a product engineer at Acuity Brands. He holds an MS in Mechanical Engineering and a BS in Physics, both from Stanford, where he graduated with Distinction and participated in the prestigious Mayfield Fellowship.

Noe Esparza

Experimenter and embedded systems Guru. Noe draws his inspiration from nature and prefers a cold beer while debugging. Noe is a generalist who’s better than most specialists. Before Momentum, he was a Systems Engineering Manager at Qbotix and holds a PhD, MS, and BS, in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford.

Steven Frehn

The uniqueness of products he has been involved with is fascinating: LED guitar necks, hexagonal solar panels, flywheel batteries and countless others. Relentless, tireless, and indomitable, Steven is the catalyst that makes Momentum alacritous. With six years of startup experience, moving quickly is all he knows and he pulls experience from small startups to large organizations like Tesla and NASA. All his know-how is backed by a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford.

Jeff C. Jensen

He is as likely to scribble theory on a whiteboard as he is to melt a circuit board and you’ll find him jumping out of airplanes and philosophizing over fine wine. Jeff has more than 15 years of engineering experience spanning software, information technology, mechatronics and embedded systems. He landed his first job in software engineering when he was a high school freshman and later worked for Cisco. He was also a Senior Product Manager at National Instruments. Jeff holds BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, where he serves as an instructional adviser in embedded and cyber-physical systems.

John (Jack) McDonald

Jack is able to recite every episode of “How it’s Made” by heart. He speaks in Delrin and always wins at craps. His career is filled with difficult prototype development and he holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from University of California, Berkeley where he was both a Regent’s and Chancellor’s scholar.

Abigail Soong

An avid baker, aspiring yogi, and eager to learn at every turn. Abby is small girl but a large kickboxer. As an engineer, she is as comfortable in mechanical analysis as she is in coding bleeding-edge distributed embedded targets. She was also an engineer at Intuitive Surgical and received her MS and BS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford.

Alex Vardakostas

Alex is here to help. His two biggest priorities are taking time to dig into science textbooks and being a loyal friend. At Momentum, he gets to combine his love of technology with a deep understanding of the food industry. Prior to founding Momentum, Alex was an engineer at Semiconductor Technology Associates and a researcher of quantum computing algorithms at University of California, Santa Barbara where he earned a BS in physics. Before college, Alex grew up working in his parent’s restaurants and was raised to take over the restaurant chain.

Matthew Williams

Part mentor, part craftsman, and Motorcyclist. Matt is a proud father inspired by his beloved twins, and his twin cylinders. He was an early employee at Intuitive Surgical and built high frequency electronics at HP before that. His Masters is from Stanford in Mechanical Engineering and his Bachelors from University of California, Berkeley.

Oshin Nazarian

Dog-lover, avid swing dancer, and aspiring human encyclopedia, Oshin is a true research scientist. He joins Momentum from sunny Santa Barbara, where he was part of the Postdoctoral Research Faculty in the Materials Science & Engineering department at UCSB. He is an expert in mechanics, composite materials, and computational analysis. Prior to Momentum, he was a Mechanical Engineer for Raytheon, and also served as a private consultant for start-up companies focused on consumer products. Oshin holds a PhD in Materials Science and a BS in Physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara.