I thought I’d talk about Titomic today, a company not as well known as it should be.
The Australian company has developed cold spray technology. Cold spray refers to the ability to spray metal particles at low temperatures at a target, which gradually builds up. The kinetic energy of the particle overcomes the oxide layer present on all exposed metals, making the particle and target immediately fuse together.
Titomic has leveraged this technology into two products: a system for coating metal objects, which can also be used for repairs; and an additive manufacturing system.
Their TKF1000 system is a large-format device capable of building 1000 x 1000 x 1000 mm metal parts in an enclosed chamber. The chamber holds a robotic arm that wields the cold spray toolhead.
They are able to quickly build large metal objects, and this has proven quite attractive to several industries, most notably defense.
Titomic first came to my attention when I built the weekly leaderboard of publicly traded companies. Titomic is one of the two dozen companies that are publicly traded, which provides the opportunity to track their valuation.
When we started tracking them back in 2022, their valuation was about US$38M. Since then, the company’s valuation has been quite volatile, rising and falling suddenly for no apparent reason. These days, it ranks among the top ten on the leaderboard with a valuation of over US$200M.
What changed?
I recently spoke to a Titomic representative and learned a bit more about the company. I asked about the company’s volatile valuation and why it was suddenly so much higher than it’s been in the past year or two.
It turns out that the company has been around since 2014 and has been valued at as much as US$300M in years past. We were told they did a capital raise in 2023, which was apparently challenging due to the negative investor sentiment.
Since then, they’ve focused more directly on the defense sector and put more effort into smaller machines. By focusing on production applications in this way, they’ve recently sold two TKF1000 systems using this new approach.
They are also able to perform production runs for customers if requested, although they told us they are not specifically competing with print services.
Their recent upturn in valuation might have something to do with their focus on the defense sector. This application area has obtained a lot more attention lately, for some not-so-great reasons. Nevertheless, Titomic’s ability to produce large metal parts for the military seems to have pushed their valuation upwards.
Via Titomic
