Another 3D printer company has undergone a corporate acquisition: Mantle was acquired by Angstrom Group.
Mantle has been around for about five years, and had developed a unique metal paste 3D printing process, TruShape. The paste would be deposited, followed by a sintering process to fuse the metal particles together.
The original goal of Mantle was to address the industrial tooling industry by producing strong metal tools in an efficient manner. They achieved this capability with their technology.
Meanwhile, Angstrom Group is a Michigan-based operation founded in 1999, producing components and assemblies for vehicle manufacturers and some other industrial customers. Currently they have around 4000 staff and their annual revenue is well into the nine-digit range. They are a big operation.
It’s not clear precisely why Angstrom Group made this acquisition, but their CEO, Nagesh Palakurthi said:
“With Mantle now part of the Angstrom family, our goal is clear—to industrialize this breakthrough metal additive technology and make it broadly accessible. By offering financing solutions and integrated tool design services, we will help customers adopt and benefit from advanced metal 3D printing—transforming manufacturing at scale.”
It’s likely that Angstrom Group could make heavy use of Mantle’s technology to produce tooling for injection molding. That process is widely used by the company to produce parts for their customers. By owning Mantle, they would gain easier and cheaper access to the technology — and perhaps prevent their competitors from doing so.
One of Angstrom’s long term strategies is vertical integration, and the acquisition of Mantle would certainly fit well into that approach.
The acquisition might also spur Angstrom to make more use of additive technology in their part designs, as it is possible to print metal parts that might not be producible with conventional manufacturing processes.
Finally, Angstrom has a huge number of locations where operations take place, more than 40 worldwide. This means that Mantle’s technology could rapidly appear at many (or all) of them, and that’s something Mantle as a small company might not have been able to do by themselves. The expense of expansion will be borne by Angstrom, not Mantle.
This is a very good move for Angstrom Group, as it provides them with a technology that can supercharge their existing activities and perhaps launch new ones in the future.
Via Mantle
