Tech investors haven’t given up on the dream of building physical products with the same speed and ease as coding software.
Executives at Free forma startup developing a new 3D printing system for metal parts, told TechCrunch that the company has raised a $67 million round 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 valuation after the funding, which PitchBook reports as $179 million.
CEO and co-founder Erik Palitsch said the funding will allow the company to upgrade its current GoldenEye printing system, which uses 18 lasers to fuse metal powders into precision parts, to a new version. Named Skyfall, the next iteration of the platform would use hundreds of lasers to produce thousands of kilograms of metal parts every day.
This is the culmination of a vision Palitsch launched in 2018 after developing rocket engines at SpaceX, where they found that industrial machines for printing metal parts are expensive, delicate and not well designed for mass production.
Their new company will build their platform from the ground up to achieve higher performance and flexibility, with an emphasis on active software controls. Palitsch says Freeform’s platform is “native AI,” noting a partnership with Nvidia that gives the company access to advanced GPUs.
“I think we’re the only no-bid manufacturing company that has H200 clusters in an on-premises data center,” Paltisch told TechCrunch. “What are they doing? We’re running physics-based simulations in real-time and learning all the different aspects of the end-to-end manufacturing workflow.”
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Data collected from sensors on the company’s manufacturing platform and during simulations allows Freeform to rapidly improve production quality and quantity.
“We have more significant data on the physics of the metal printing process than any other company in the world,” said Chief Talent Officer Cameron Kay.
While Palitsch said he could not disclose any customers, he said the company already delivers hundreds of “mission-critical” parts to buyers each week. Now, the company wants to hire up to 100 new employees and expand its facilities to begin fulfilling its backlog.
Manufacturing-as-a-service has grown as a category as venture capitalists have shown greater interest in building vehicles, robots and power generation systems. For example, Hadrian recently won worth $1.6 billion from its investors while developing automated manufacturing for defense, and VulcanForms and Divergent have raised hundreds of millions to develop their own metal printing services.
Correction: This piece originally stated that Thomas Ronacher is president of Freeform, but has since left the company.
