Freeform Raises $67M Series B to Expand Laser AI Production | TechCrunch

Tech investors haven’t given up on the dream of making physical products with the same speed and ease as coding software.

Executives from Freeform, a startup developing a new 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 company’s valuation after the funding, which Pitchbook lists 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 melt metal powders into precision parts, to the new version. The next iteration of the platform, called Skyfall, would use hundreds of lasers to produce thousands of kilograms of metal parts every day.

It’s the culmination of a vision that Palitsch and co-founder/president Thomas Ronacher launched in 2018. The two met while developing rocket engines at SpaceX, where they discovered that industrial machines for printing metal parts were expensive, finicky and not well-designed for mass production.

Their new company would build their platform from the ground up to achieve higher throughput and flexibility, with an emphasis on active software controls. Palitsch says Freeform’s platform is “native to artificial intelligence,” pointing to a partnership with Nvidia that gives the company access to advanced GPUs.

“I think we’re the only manufacturing company that has H200 clusters on site in the data center,” Paltisch told TechCrunch. “What are they doing? We’re doing real-time physics simulations and learning all the different aspects of the end-to-end manufacturing workflow.”

Data collected by sensors in the company’s production platform and during simulations allows Freeform to rapidly improve the quality and quantity of production.

“We have more meaningful data on the physics of the metal printing process than any company in the world,” said Head of Talent Cameron Kay.

While Palitsch said he could not disclose any customers, he said the company is already supplying hundreds of “critical” parts to buyers. Now the company wants to hire up to 100 new employees and expand its facilities to begin fulfilling its orders.

Manufacturing as a service has grown as a category as venture capitalists have become more interested in building vehicles, robots and power generation systems. For example, Hadrian recently received a $1.6 billion valuation from its investors to develop automated manufacturing for defense, and VulcanForms and Divergent raised hundreds of millions to develop their own metal printing services.