Tech investors haven’t given up on the dream of making portable products with the same speed and ease as coding software.
Executives from Freeform, a startup that is developing a novel 3D printing system for metal parts, told TechCrunch that the company has 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 value of the company after the financing, which Pitchbook quotes 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, into a new version. Called Skyfall, the next iteration of the platform will use hundreds of lasers to produce thousands of kilograms of metal parts each day.
That’s the culmination of an idea Palitsch and founder/president Thomas Ronacher presented in 2018. The two met while developing rocket engines for SpaceX, when they discovered that industrial machinery for printing metal parts was expensive, rigid, and poorly designed for mass production.
Their new company will build its platform from the ground up to achieve a high level of usability and flexibility, with an emphasis on effective software management. Palitsch says Freeform’s platform is “native AI,” noting a partnership with Nvidia that gives the company access to advanced GPUs.
“I think they’re the only quote-unquote manufacturing company out there that has H200 clusters in an on-site data center,” Paltisch told TechCrunch. “What are they doing? We’re doing real-time physics-based simulations and studying all the different end-to-end features to set up the manufacturing workflow.”
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Data collected by sensors in the company’s production facility and during simulation allows Freeform to rapidly improve production quality and quantity.
“We have more insight into the physics of the metal printing process than any company in the world,” says head of talent Cameron Kay.
While Palitsch said he could not reveal any customers, he said the company is already delivering hundreds of “critical” parts to consumers. Now, the company wants to hire about 100 new employees and expand its space to begin processing its backlog of contract work.
Manufacturing-as-a-service has grown as a sector as business investors have taken a greater interest in building cars, robots, and power generation systems. For example, Hadrian recently secured a $1.6B valuation from its investors while developing automated defense manufacturing, and VulcanForms and Divergent raised hundreds of millions to develop their metal stamping services.
