Nexa3D has been awarded a patent!
Two years ago this would have appeared to be quite a normal event: 3D print companies are often awarded patents for ingenious devised methods.
Now, however, things are different. Nexa3D doesn’t really exist anymore. The company made a big splash in the 3D print world over the past few years by launching new 3D print options, and later acquiring a number of other 3D print processes from other startups.
Then things went south, and finances seemed to be the issue. About a year ago strong rumors erupted about the company’s health, and then later it became clear the company had ceased operations. Today if you hit their website you are now directed to the “iAM Marketplace”, a subsidiary of Stratasys — more on that later.
And now Nexa3D has just been awarded a Japanese patent, JP-2025169950-A, “”Method and system for determining viscosity of photocurable resin for vat photopolymerization printers”. What is it about? Here’s the abstract:
“A method and system for forming 3D articles by a vat photopolymerization process is provided, in which the torque required to raise and lower a build plate through the resin in the vat is measured both before the build process begins and, optionally, during the build process, thereby determining the viscosity of the resin. The resin may be heated, and the viscosity of the resin is altered by heating the resin in the vat using a light engine employed to manufacture the 3D article.”
This sounds like a reasonable feature one might want to have on a resin 3D printer. This is the Japanese version of an earlier 2020 patent.
The patent belongs to Nexa3D, which no longer operates. Evidently the slow and ponderous patent process eventually put out the award long after Nexa3D collapsed.
But who controls Nexa3D? Earlier this year Stratasys picked up the scraps leftover from Nexa3D, likely paying a discounted sum to the shareholders of the failed company. That deal included the “intellectual property” of Nexa3D.
The intellectual property surely includes any patents, and if Stratasys wrote the contract properly, they would also receive ownership of any patents that were pending approval, such as JP-2025169950-A.
When 3D print companies die, it’s often thought that their technologies die with them. One one hand, that’s probably a good thing: if the technologies were commercially viable, then they would have helped the company be profitable. On the other hand, technologies can be excellent, but suffer from poor management or finances.
The truth is that these technologies don’t officially die with failed companies. Typically the assets of the failed company are sold off by bankruptcy agencies in an attempt to recover as much cash as possible, usually at steep discounts.
In the 3D print space, the assets often include patents, in addition to the physical property of the company. This means that the buyers become the new owners of the patents, and therefore the technologies don’t completely disappear.
Do these technologies get resurrected? Often this is not the case, for the same reason mentioned above: the technology wasn’t that good.
In this case Stratasys has obtained another patent from Nexa3D, just a bit later in the cycle. Whether they act on the patent is totally unclear, but odds are it will sit on the shelf.
Via Google Patents
