3D printing company Carbon3D has closed a $100 million Series C investment round led by Google Ventures. The company intends to use this capital to further develop its technology with the goal of making 3D printing a core part of the manufacturing process.
Founded in 2013, Carbon3D’s aim is to help commercial firms move beyond basic prototyping and extend 3D printing into the actual manufacturing space. Targeted industries include aerospace, automotive, consumer electronics, athletic apparel, medical/dental, and industrial groups. The hope is that this will usher in a renaissance in how products are produced, thereby helping to reduce costs.
This spring Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne called out the auto industry for the staggering amount of money it wastes in the design and manufacture of cars. His solution is based on classic business principles: consolidate and eliminate redundancy. Local Motors CEO Jay Rogers perceives the same challenge, but he's attacking it from a completely different direction. For Rogers, the problem stems not from business organization but from the fact that we still build cars the same way we did in 1915, on assembly lines with thousands of individual parts. It doesn't have to be that way, and the proof is parked in his Knoxville, Tennessee, garage, charged up and ready for a drive.
The ramping up of the 3D printing sector continued Tuesday as New York-based Shapeways announced it raised $30 million in a round led by INKEF Capital, with Andreessen Horowitz, Lux Capital, Union Square Ventures, and Index Ventures participating.
Corporate venture capitalists Hewlett Packard Ventures and Presidio Ventures, part of Sumitomo Corp., also invested in this funding round.
The inventor of a new kind of 3-D printer says his research group will build a massive machine capable of mass-producing competitively priced plastic parts within two years.
Making plastic parts layer by layer according to digital instructions is a very slow process compared with conventional methods. That’s why additive manufacturing–or 3-D printing, as it is more popularly known–has thus far been economical only for making small batches of niche products like dental implants and hearing-aid shells. The new technique could increase the number of parts that can be made economically this way from thousands to millions at a time, at least for small, complicated objects.
Las modas vienen, van, y muchas veces se repiten. En ULMA Conveyor Components S.Coop. (UCC) nos mojó la del “embedding”, o el arte de meter electrónica en los lugares más insospechados.
UCC fabrica y comercializa componentes para cintas transportadoras. Un mercado donde confluyen competidores locales y transnacionales, y en donde nuestro principal producto, el rodillo, es considerado una commodity.
In recent years, the applications for 3D printing in healthcare have been expanding into the limitless. Once reserved primarily for prototyping, the technology has quickly proliferated in the life sciences – with applications that range from personalized surgical implants, scaffolding and tissue generation.
Some more reorganization afoot at Stratasys, the 3D printing and manufacturing company: it has announced that it has spun off Bold Machines, a unit of the company founded in September 2014 focused on incubating new products made with 3D printing.
Hay que prestar mucha atención a lo que está haciendo, en el ámbito de la inversión en nuevas compañías, la ferroviaria CAF, que ha entrado en el capital de Tumaker, una startup de impresión 3D promovida en Gipuzkoa por Jon Bengoetxea. Se lo cuenta el promotor de la empesa a Xabier Aja en una interesante entrevista en la que describe el proyecto y las elevadas expectativas que está despertanto en euskera este componente esencial de la industria 4.0. De la mano de CAF, la startup podrá acelerar su crecimiento y salir al exterior.
3-D printing, or additive manufacturing, is likely to revolutionize business in the next several years. Often dismissed in the popular mindset as a tool for home-based “makers” of toys and trinkets, the technology is gaining momentum in large-scale industry. Already it has moved well beyond prototyping and, as I explain in a new HBR article, it will increasingly be used to produce high-volume parts and products in several industries.
