Founded by engineers from SpaceX, the company has raised $45M to date and is backed by investors including Two Sigma Ventures, Founders Fund and Threshold Ventures
Freeform, a metal 3D printing company is making its debuts on the AM scene, with autonomous printing factories at the heart of its activities.
The company aims to minimize production barriers related to a heavy reliance on human labor – which on its opinion, have fundamentally limited the pace of innovation and resulted in long and costly efforts to scale production.
Freeform’s autonomous printing factories and manufacturing-as-a-service business model would be based on a proprietary technology stack which brings the scalability of software to physical production by leveraging advanced sensing, real-time controls, and data-driven learning in a scalable factory architecture.
As a result, the company is producing digitally-verified, high-quality parts at unprecedented speed and cost. This breakthrough approach enables all industries to innovate faster by leveraging additive manufacturing to produce parts at mass production scale.
“While at SpaceX, I leveraged metal 3D printing to accelerate the development of numerous rocket engines. We were innovating in ways that were not possible before and accelerating our trajectory toward the future; however, we ultimately realized that it was impossible to print at production scale using even the best current technologies. We founded Freeform to solve this problem and to make this transformative technology available to all industries, giving anyone the ability to rapidly take an idea and produce it at scale,” said Erik Palitsch, Co-Founder and CEO of Freeform. “We’re bringing the best talent on the planet together to disrupt the manufacturing industry, and with our recent fundraise, we’re excited to scale production capacity to make printing at scale available to all industries.”
Freeform is already helping customers to innovate and get products to market faster. “As Embark brings autonomous trucking technology to market, we need the ability to seamlessly scale up from prototype to production,” said Brandon Connors, Head of Programs and Manufacturing at Embark Trucks, a leading developer of autonomous technology for the trucking industry. “That means sourcing commercial-grade metal parts on short timelines, consistently and at a practical cost. Freeform’s printing service enables us to meet our manufacturing needs, improves supply chain reliability, and gives us the ability to change designs without impacting delivery time, so that we can accelerate the deployment of our technology.”
From initial designs into high-volume production
“Freeform offers us the ability to scale up from prototype to production.” said Nick Doucette, Chief Operations Officer at Ursa Major. Ursa Major is an American aerospace company that works with Freeform for the manufacturing of rocket engine parts. “Freeform’s printing service gives us the ability to change designs rapidly without impacting production cost or delivery time. We are able to get consistent, high-quality metal parts in days instead of weeks.”
Freeform’s world-class team comprises industry leaders from the likes of SpaceX, Velo3D, Carbon, Tesla, and Apple, who have successfully overcome the challenges of disruption.
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