VulcanForms has raised a very large investment.
The Massachusetts-based company announced they’ve received US$220M in an oversubscribed financing round. This is perhaps one of the biggest investments we’ve seen in a 3D printing company for quite a while.
VulcanForms is a lesser-known operation that focuses on metal 3D printing. They’ve developed a way to scale up the LBPF in a rather dramatic way. Instead of having, say, four 1kW lasers working on the powder bed, their system apparently uses up to 75 lasers all at once — and consuming 100kW of energy at that. This enables much higher throughput than one could achieve on other LBPF systems.
There’s another big difference between VulcanForms and their competition: they don’t actually sell the equipment. Instead, they keep the machines in-house and accept print requests from customers and produce parts.
This vastly simplifies their operations because they don’t need to maintain a large support organization and can upgrade the equipment as soon as they can without having to wait for customers. In addition, their operations techs can become highly experienced on the equipment and get better output than customers would on their own. They can scale up by simply dropping more factories of this type wherever they are required.
All of this is quite attractive, and in the past has led investors to sink US$350M into the company over several investment rounds.
Now there’s another huge investment: US$220M. VulcanForms explains:
”The financing reflects growing demand for secure domestic production of next-generation metal products and reinforces VulcanForms’ role in strengthening critical American advanced manufacturing capability.”
VulcanForms explained that the cash will help them expand their “fully integrated manufacturing facilities”. I take that to mean, “more factories”.
The timing of this investment seems to register: there has been heightened interest in metal 3D printing recently, mostly due to military and aerospace applications that are being pushed due to various geopolitical concerns.
Therefore, it would be a good time to expand, and that costs money. Since interest is high, it was apparently easy to raise the cash they require for the expansion.
As of now, VulcanForms has been funded to the tune of US$575M, according to Crunchbase. That certainly makes the company one of the most well-funded operations in a field filled with companies of questionable profitability.
Via VulcanForms
