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Tech investors haven\u2019t given up on the dream of making physical products with the same speed and ease as coding software.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Executives at Freeform<\/a>, a startup developing a novel 3D printing system for metal components, told TechCrunch that the company raised a $67 million Series B to expand its manufacturing platform.\u00a0<\/p>\n Investors include Apandion, AE Ventures, Founders Fund, Linse Capital, NVidia\u2019s NVentures , Threshold Ventures, and Two Sigma Ventures. FreeForm declined to disclose the company\u2019s post-financing valuation, which Pitchbook cites as $179 million.<\/p>\n CEO and cofounder Erik Palitsch said the funding would allow the company to upgrade its current GoldenEye printing system, which uses 18 lasers to fuse metal powders into precision components, to a new version. Dubbed Skyfall, the next iteration of the platform would use hundreds of lasers to produce thousands of kilograms of metal parts each day.\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s the culmination of a vision Palitsch and co-founder\/president Thomas Ronacher launched in 2018. The two met while developing rocket engines at SpaceX, where they found that industrial machines for printing metal components are expensive, finicky, and not well designed for mass manufacturing.\u00a0<\/p>\n Their new company would build its platform from the ground up to achieve higher throughput and flexibility, with an emphasis on active software controls. Palitsch says Freeform\u2019s platform is \u201cAI native,\u201d noting a partnership with Nvidia<\/a> that allows the company to access advanced GPUs.<\/p>\n \u201cI think we\u2019re the only quote-unquote manufacturing company out there that has H200 clusters in a data center on site,\u201d Paltisch told TechCrunch. \u201cWhat are they doing? We\u2019re running real-time physics-based simulations and learning all the different aspects of the end to end manufacturing workflow.\u201d<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBoston, MA<\/span> The data collected by sensors in the company\u2019s manufacturing platform and during the simulations allows Freeform to rapidly improve production quality and quantity.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe have more meaningful data on the physics of the metal-printing process than any company in the world,\u201d head of talent Cameron Kay said.\u00a0<\/p>\n While Palitsch said he could not disclose any customers, he said the company is already delivering hundreds of \u201cmission-critical\u201d parts to buyers. Now, the company wants to hire as many as 100 new employees and expand its facility to start executing on its contract backlog.\u00a0<\/p>\n Manufacturing-as-a-service has grown as a category as venture investors have taken a greater interest in building vehicles, robots, and energy production systems. For example, Hadrian recently earned a $1.6B valuation<\/a> from its investors while developing automated production<\/a> for defense, and VulcanForms and Divergent have raised hundreds of millions to develop metal-printing services of their own.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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