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Formlabs Raises $35 Million in Series B Funding, Announces Autodesk Partnership 3D Printer Hardware

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Formlabs, the company founded in 2012 by MIT graduates that changed the SLA market forever when it introduced the first low cost SLA system, has raised $35 million in Series B funding. The round came from Foundry Group and Autodesk, as Formlabs also announced plans to collaborate strategically with the global CAD software leader. The investment includes participation from existing investors DFJ Growth, Pitango Venture Capital, and Pascal Cagni, bringing Formlabs’ total investment to date to $55 million. Beside giving yet another demonstration of the ever clearer potential of 3D printing, these newly injected resource will enable Formlabs to scale its operations to meet growing customer demand worldwide, grow R&D efforts, and to extend Formlabs’ reach in the market and ecosystem. “Formlabs’ efforts over the years in introducing new materials and capabilities have defined the category of professional desktop 3D printing, resulting in significant growth for the company along the way,” said Max Lobovsky, co-founder and CEO of Formlabs. “With the new investment, we’re excited to develop more powerful tools to enable anyone working with 3D content to create remarkable things. Formlabs will continue to grow the stereolithography business and bring new tools to the world to advance our goal of making digital fabrication more powerful and accessible.” Joining Formlabs’ board will be Brad Feld, co-founder of Foundry Group whose investments include MakerBot and Fitbit. Feld has been an early stage investor and entrepreneur for over 20 years and was co-founder of Techstars. “From the moment of its founding, Formlabs saw the opportunity in making professional desktop 3D printing accessible and was a key pioneer in the category,” said Brad Feld, co-founder of Foundry Group. “While the excitement and hype around consumer 3D printing has waned, the professional 3D printing category has had unabated demand, with Formlabs emerging as the leader in desktop 3D printing.” With Autodesk’s investment in Formlabs, the two companies plan to strategically collaborate on software integration and joint marketing initiatives. “Formlabs has brought a lot of innovation and great execution to the desktop 3D printing market, and Autodesk is excited to invest in the company’s future,” said Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk. “But even more importantly, we’re eager to work together to improve digital design and manufacturing for product designers everywhere.” Pascal Cagni, who was head of Apple in Europe, will be joining as a strategic advisor to help bolster Formlabs’ expansion efforts across the EMEA territory. Through an expanding network of distribution partners, Formlabs’ global reach now extends across five continents in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America. With rapid growth across all business fronts, Formlabs has seen 100 percent growth in annual sales for the third consecutive year and is shipping over 1,000 printers a month. Formlabs printers are now the top-selling 3D printers in stereolithography worldwide. Earlier this year, Formlabs acquired Pinshape, the fast-growing 3D printing community online that hosts a flourishing marketplace of 3D designs. Most recently opening a location in Japan, Formlabs now has over 190 employees across offices in North America, Europe, and Asia. About Formlabs Formlabs designs and manufactures powerful and accessible 3D printing systems for engineers, designers, and artists. Their flagship product, the Form 2 3D printer, uses stereolithography (SLA) to create high-resolution physical objects from digital designs. The company was founded in 2012 by a team of engineers and designers from the MIT Media Lab and Center for Bits and Atoms. With its powerful, intuitive, and affordable machines, Formlabs is establishing a new benchmark in professional desktop 3D printing. Formlabs also develops its own suite of high-performance materials for 3D printing, as well as best-in-class 3D printing software. About Foundry Group Foundry Group is a venture capital firm that invests in information technology, Internet, and software startups. It works alongside entrepreneurs to give birth to new technologies and to build those technologies into industry-leading companies. It is located in Boulder, CO but invests in companies across North America. About Autodesk Autodesk makes software for people who make things. If you’ve ever driven a high-performance car, admired a towering skyscraper, used a smartphone, or watched a great film, chances are you’ve experienced what millions of Autodesk customers are doing with our software. Autodesk gives you the power to make anything. For more information visit autodesk.com or follow @autodesk.

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Nanoscribe’s 3D Printer Established on the US market 3D Printer Hardware

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In June, the 3D printer manufacturer Nanoscribe held its first user meeting in the US at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In collaboration with the institution’s Center for Nanoscale Systems (CNS), which makes a Nanoscribe laser lithography system available both to internal and external users in its multi-user facility, the market and technology leader invited its clients to a two-day seminar. Besides being treated to a glimpse of the latest software and hardware developments, attendees were shown a vast array of areas of application for the Photonic Professional GT 3D printer, ranging from maskless lithography to additive manufacturing. The technological possibilities range from the manufacture of extremely high-resolution mesoscale objects to applications in photonics and plasmonics, requiring structure sizes of just a few hundred nanometers. The CEO of Nanoscribe, Martin Hermatschweiler, reports, “The presentations by our clients on their various applications were the absolute highlight for me. It is incredibly fascinating and enlightening to discover firsthand what different disciplinary fields are making use of our devices, which operate based on the principle of two-photon polymerization. The full scope of applications ranged from printing nanostructures at the CNS, to producing plasmonic displays at the University of Florida, to engineering new types of materials whose creation would have previously been impossible, as the scientists at Caltech presented.” As a standard for microfabrication, the high-precision Nanoscribe systems are furthermore utilized at universities, research institutes, and in R&D departments for many other tasks in the areas of medical technology, micro-optics and microfluidics as well as for micro-rapid prototyping. Already half of the top 10 universities across the globe are Nanoscribe clients. This makes the company the global player on the market for 3D printers of nano- and microstructures. Within a just a few years, Nanoscribe has managed to turn from a spin-off of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT, Germany) to a medium-sized company. A broad array of honors and awards, such as the 2014 Prism Award or 2015 WTN Award as well as Nanoscribe’s finalist position for the Deutscher Gründerpreis 2015 (2015 German Founders’ Award), underscore the extraordinary performance and significance of this expanding high-tech company.

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AM Europe Show, the Biggest Announcements in Photos 3D Printer Hardware

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Even though the first edition was a difficult – but necessary – transition from the consumer-focused 3DPrintshow to a more professional level trade show, the first AM Europe show can be considered a success. Not many visitors, numerically speaking, but a much more qualified professional target which makes for better business. For many companies – Ultimaker and Zortrax in particular – the show was an opportunity to make some big announcement (quite literally in the case of Zortrax’s M300). These two companies, more than others, represent the possibilities that the consumer 3D printing hype created. They were born as consumer projects and they were able to evolve into real and structured multinational companies. Jos Burger, Ultimaker’s CEO, is perhaps one of the best representations of this trend as he brought a global multinational mentality to a young startup. He explained that “there is no doubt that people are moving away from the hyped up consumer 3D printing idea. No one is talking about it any more. Now it is all about the industry and the incredible possibilities that 3D printing can offer to professionals at all levels.” The truth is that desktop 3D printing is far from dead: instead of bringing a 3D printer in every house, it made it possible for every one who wanted to to invent a new profession, opening up the previously unaccessible manufacturing and prototyping market to more people than ever before. This is resulting and will continue to result in more innovation than ever. Here are some photogalleries from the best new things we saw at the show.

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Cosine Additive Announces Partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory 3D Printer Hardware

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Cosine Additive LLC is partnering with the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in the development of a revolutionary new additive manufacturing platform. The goal of this partnership is to develop and demonstrate the enabling technologies for mid-scale additive manufacturing using Cosine’s AM1 machine. The AM1 has a build chamber of approximately 4’ x 4’ x 4’ and will open up new areas of U.S. manufacturing for rapid production of medium size tooling in support of the transportation, appliance and energy industries, significantly reducing cost and lead time. As with Big Area Additive Manufacturing (BAAM), the initial focus is on the deposition of composite materials. Printing with carbon fiber filament is still in its infancy with its immediate value just starting to be realized by manufacturing industries.

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Low Cost 3D Printer Sales Grow by 59% in 2015 by Expanding Into “Prosumer” Segment 3D Printer Hardware

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The latest “Opportunities in Low-Cost 3D Printers: Technologies, Materials and Markets 2016” report by SmarTech Publishing indicates that, in spite of significant decrements by the traditional leaders in this area, low cost 3D printer sales grew both in terms of unit sales and revenues, driven in part by the new “prosumer” segment and enterprise-level adoption of desktop 3D printing.