Technology investors haven’t given up on the dream of creating physical products with the same speed and ease of coding software.
Executives at Freeform, a startup developing a new 3D printing system for metal parts, told TechCrunch that the company has raised $67 million in Series B funding to expand its manufacturing platform.
Investors include Apandion, AE Ventures, Founders Fund, Linse Capital, NVidia’s NVentures, Threshold Ventures, and Two Sigma Ventures. Freeform declined to disclose the company’s post-funding valuation, but Pitchbook put it at $179 million.
CEO and co-founder Eric Palitsch said the funding will allow the company to upgrade to a new version of its current GoldenEye printing system, which uses 18 lasers to melt metal powder into precision parts. The next version of the platform, called Skyfall, will use hundreds of lasers to produce thousands of kilograms of metal parts each day.
This is the culmination of a vision that Palitsch and co-founder and president Thomas Ronacher launched in 2018. The two met while developing rocket engines at SpaceX, where they realized that industrial machinery for printing metal parts was expensive, cumbersome, and not well designed for mass production.
Their new company plans to build the platform from the ground up to achieve higher throughput and flexibility, with a focus on active software control. Palitsch said Freeform’s platform is “AI native,” citing a partnership with Nvidia that gives the company access to advanced GPUs.
“I believe we are the only manufacturing company that has an H200 cluster in their on-site data center,” Partish told TechCrunch. “What are they doing? We’re running real-time physics-based simulations and learning all the different aspects of the end-to-end manufacturing workflow.”
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Sensors on the company’s manufacturing platform and data collected during simulation allow Freeform to quickly improve production quality and quantity.
“We have more meaningful data on the physics of metal printing processes than any other company in the world,” said Cameron Kaye, Head of Talent.
Palitsch said he could not reveal the customers, but said the company has already delivered hundreds of “mission-critical” parts to buyers. The company now wants to hire as many as 100 new employees and expand its facilities to begin fulfilling outstanding contracts.
Manufacturing as a service has grown as a category as venture investors have become increasingly interested in building vehicles, robots, and energy production systems. For example, Hadrian recently received a $1.6 billion valuation from investors while developing autonomous production for defense. VulcanForms and Divergent also raised hundreds of millions of dollars to develop their own metal printing services.
