The Chicago in-situ inspection specialist secures its first institutional venture raise on top of more than $3.5M in prior government grants.
Phase3D, the Chicago-based expert in real-time quality inspection for metal additive manufacturing (AM), has closed an oversubscribed $2.9M funding round. Quest Venture Partners led the round, with participation from Trinity Capital, Kinisis Ventures, Leroy Street Capital Partners, Asimov Ventures and others. The capital will scale up Fringe Inspection, the company’s flagship structured-light heightmap sensor, and bring in-process inspection to metal AM printers worldwide.
“We are excited to announce Phase3D’s completion of a pivotal funding round. We have raised capital to support the continued growth and increasing deployments of our flagship quality inspection product for metal 3D printing. This investment will catalyze faster adoption of real-time quality inspection for additive manufacturing, and we are very excited for the future,” said Dr Niall O’Dowd, Founder & CEO of Phase3D.
Formerly Additive Monitoring Systems, Phase3D is a company we have followed since its early-adopter programme and its $1.25M cold-spray inspection contract with the Air Force Research Lab. Its Fringe Inspection technology uses structured-light metrology to generate layer-by-layer heightmaps on metal powder bed fusion machines, measuring powder-bed consistency, spatter, recoater streaks and internal geometry as a build progresses, so operators can characterize anomalies as they form rather than during post-process CT inspection.
Phase3D previously secured more than $3.5M in non-dilutive grants from the US Air Force, NASA and the US Navy, when it began correlating build anomalies to final part defects.
The company will now move from high-mix custom builds to standardized manufacturing at scale, expand its software and data-science teams, and accelerate deployments, with the stated aim of becoming the industry standard for in-situ inspection.
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