3Dprintler has received a massive cash boost of almost $1 million from an angel investor and has set its sights on becoming the ultimate pricing search engine in the 3D printing industry.
The Canadian company offers a unique service as the end-user can upload and customise designs, then obtain the best price through a chatbot system that connects to more than 1400 suppliers.
A concierge service for the industry
They first launched it as a traditional platform-based price search engine a few months ago, built from the earlier 3Dponics project.
Now they turn it into a chatbot and they’re billing it as a concierge service that simply harnesses the power of technology to find the cheapest possible price for local 3D printing services. It’s a system that has already proven effective in areas as diverse as shipping and flights to freelance home work. When it’s boiled down to the basics, it’s a bidding system with a number of bells and whistles.
3Dprintler’s chatbot system does take the whole thing to another level, though, and the technology itself could prove useful for other industries. If nothing else it streamlines the whole quotation process and that could be the golden ticket for the company.
The bot system is fully integrated with a number of messaging services, including:
- Slack
- Telegram
- Facebook Messenger (Pending approval)
- Skype (Pending approval)
- Kik (Coming soon)
- SMS (Coming soon)
The major players are on board
The system compares prices from some of the largest suppliers in the industry, including Shapeways, iMaterialize, MakeXYZ and Sculpteo. The chatbot, not an app, as 3Dprintler is fond of saying, offers complete soup to nuts purchasing. That means you can order a complete printed product or individual parts like printing filament and scanning software. It also incorporates information from comparison site Aniwaa.
You can get a same-day service for a lot of products and 24-hour delivery in many cases. Custom designs are available in a variety of metals, plastic, ceramics and even platinum or gold. That means bespoke jewellers can go even further with their designs and get a fast turnaround for demanding clients.
There have been tough times
The company has been through the ringer to get to this point. Founders Michael Golubev, Anja Pujic and Ramadan Halili ran it from their apartment after trying unsuccessfully to secure funding from the Canadian government’s Industrial Research Assistance Program.
That left them fighting for their very survival. It really was that tight. Did they actually turn down a 7 figures offer back in summer last year?
They went on a mission and scoured the globe for a private source of funding to keep the team of 14 afloat. Now the company has the capital in place for the next 18 months of operations and also wants to pay it forward with a $100,000 pre-seed investment fund. This should help other entrepreneurs get their idea off the ground and add to the 3Dprintler stable.
Creating a chatbot ecosystem
The company is looking to support new ventures that are working on algorithms to fix and convert base CAD files as well as artificial intelligence bots, 3D scanning apps and augmented-reality printing processes and products.
When combined with the chatbot system, any one of these could mark 3dprintler out as a major player in the service side of the 3D printing industry and beyond. That angel investor’s million, then, could be repaid many times over if this technology can cross over into other fields or if the company can truly stake its claim and become the first port of call if you’re looking for 3D printing.
3Dprintler wants to do for additive printing what Kayak has done for the travel industry. If it can hit those lofty goals, then those days running the business from their apartment will soon be a distant memory and $1 million funding will be just a drop in the chatbot ocean.
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