VulcanForms is expanding.
The company has developed a unique metal 3D printing process that can handle large volumes. In other words, it’s scalable to significant manufacturing levels.
Their process is quite interesting, as it involves very high energies. Their Gen 3 system consumes up to 100kW of energy while printing, and that’s because it uses no less than 75 lasers simultaneously to fuse metal powder. This extreme parallelism allows them to complete jobs far faster, and thus more economically.
There’s another unique feature of VulcanForms: they don’t sell their 3D printers. Their business model is to build a factory with their equipment, and then accept and complete customer job requests. This approach eliminates the need for customer equipment servicing, keeps all the equipment up to date in-house, and allows the equipment to be operated by their own experts at all times.
But does that approach work?
Indeed, it does. They raised a whopping US$220M earlier this year, and the plans were to build yet another factory for their busy equipment.
In a report from the Boston Globe, VulcanForms is now building a “vast new factory” near Boston that is expected to generate another 1,000 manufacturing jobs. The plant is apparently quite large, with a size of one million square feet.
No company would build such a large plant without a clear expectation of sufficient business volume to make back their investment. Therefore, we can assume that VulcanForms is doing very well.
Via Boston Globe
