Tech investors haven’t given up on the dream of making physical products with the same speed and ease as coding software.
Executives at Freeform, 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.
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-financing valuation, which Pitchbook cites as $179 million.
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.
That’s 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.
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’s platform is “AI native,” noting a partnership with Nvidia that allows the company to access advanced GPUs.
“I think we’re the only quote-unquote manufacturing company out there that has H200 clusters in a data center on site,” Paltisch 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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The data collected by sensors in the company’s manufacturing platform and during the simulations allows Freeform to rapidly improve production quality and quantity.
“We have more meaningful data on the physics of the metal-printing process than any company in the world,” head of talent Cameron Kay said.
While Palitsch said he could not disclose any customers, he said the company is already delivering hundreds of “mission-critical” 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.
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 from its investors while developing automated production for defense, and VulcanForms and Divergent have raised hundreds of millions to develop metal-printing services of their own.
