Tech investors remain captivated by the dream of creating physical products with the speed and simplicity of coding software. Executives at Freeform, a startup building a novel 3D printing system for metal parts, recently confirmed the company raised a $67 million Series B round to expand its manufacturing platform. The investor group includes Apandion, AE Ventures, Founders Fund, Linse Capital, NVentures from Nvidia, Threshold Ventures, and Two Sigma Ventures. Freeform chose not to disclose its valuation after this financing, though Pitchbook cites it as $179 million.
CEO and cofounder Erik Palitsch explained the new capital will fund an upgrade from its current GoldenEye printing system to a next-generation platform called Skyfall. The GoldenEye system uses 18 lasers to fuse metal powders into precision components. The new Skyfall platform aims to employ hundreds of lasers to produce thousands of kilograms of metal parts daily.
This advancement is the culmination of a vision that Palitsch and co-founder President Thomas Ronacher launched in 2018. The pair met while developing rocket engines at SpaceX, where they observed that industrial machines for printing metal components were often expensive, finicky, and poorly designed for mass production. They founded Freeform to build a platform from the ground up, prioritizing higher throughput, flexibility, and sophisticated software controls.
Palitsch describes Freeform’s platform as “AI native,” highlighting a partnership with Nvidia that provides access to advanced GPUs. He stated that Freeform is likely the only manufacturing company with H200 GPU clusters in an on-site data center. These systems run real-time, physics-based simulations to learn and optimize every aspect of the end-to-end manufacturing workflow.
Sensors within the manufacturing platform collect data during both actual production and simulations. This information allows Freeform to rapidly improve both the quality and quantity of its output. The company’s head of talent, Cameron Kay, claimed Freeform possesses more meaningful data on the physics of the metal-printing process than any other company in the world.
While Palitsch could not name specific customers, he revealed the company is already delivering hundreds of mission-critical parts to buyers. With this new funding, Freeform plans to hire up to 100 new employees and expand its facility to begin addressing its contract backlog.
The manufacturing-as-a-service category has grown as venture investors show increased interest in building vehicles, robots, and energy production systems. For example, Hadrian recently achieved a $1.6 billion valuation from investors for its work in automated production for defense. Other companies like VulcanForms and Divergent have also raised hundreds of millions of dollars to develop their own metal-printing services.