If the first six years of Formlabs represented the 3D printing startup's first chapter, what comes next is clearly the second.
At its Digital Factory event on Monday, Formlabs revealed two new products that are a major step forward in the Somerville startup's effort to become a leader in desktop 3D printing and, more broadly, manufacturing. This comes after the company last year raised a $35 million Series B round led by Brad Feld's venture capital firm Foundry Group and announced that Autodesk, the computer-aided design software giant, would become a strategic investor.
Beyond Autodesk, the company also revealed on Tuesday that Boston-based New Balance will use Formlabs' 3D printers at its facilities to make high-performance footwear products for large-scale production, starting in 2018. As part of the new partnership, Formlabs will also create footwear-specific materials for New Balance.
Formlabs' first new product takes the company's flagship Form 2 printer, which was first announced in fall 2015, and stacks five of them in a row into an automated assembly line. Called the Form Cell, the system uses a large robotic arm to load the printers with the correct materials and then move the finished prints into post-production.
Dávid Lakatos, chief product officer at Formlabs, told me the system automates the most repetitive tasks associated with its Form 2 printer, meaning that it can substantially lower the cost of every part it produces. This means it can also help companies reduce the number of employees they need at any given time to man the printers.
Without the automated system, Lakatos said, it would take 15 printers working 30 percent of the time and three employees to print a day's worth of parts. For the same output, it would only require Form Cell's five printers working 90 percent of the time with one part-time or full-time employee.
"This creates a scenario that allows you to scale whatever the production needs to be," Lakatos said.
Formlabs is targeting customers in the field of what is called "mass customization," where every part of a large production run is customized to certain specifications. For instance, a company making prosthetics, hearing aids and dental products could benefit from a system that can make custom parts in a more efficient manner.
The second product Formlabs revealed on Tuesday is a new kind of 3D printer altogether. Called the Fuse 1, the printer uses selective laser sintering to produce tougher, lower-cost parts than those created by the company's Form 2 printer, which uses stereolithography to print higher resolution components. The Fuse 1, whose parts can be designed for prototyping and end-use, also has a larger production envelope than the Form 2's. One of the other draws for the system is that it costs $9,000, which the company said is 20 times less expensive than the cheapest industrial machine on the market.
Formlabs said numerous companies are already testing the Fuse 1, including Google. Dave Beardsley, manager of Google's ATAP Skunkworks division, said SLS technology can help companies accelerate the prototyping process by "combining realistic material properties with the minimization of 3D printing design components."
"With the Fuse 1, a combination of high precision parts, reduced cycle time and robust materials allow teams to easily iterate throughout the design process and accelerate from whiteboard to final parts," he said in a statement.
Since its founding in 2011, Formlabs has shipped 25,000 printers that have produced 2 million parts. The company's revenue has doubled consecutively for the last three years, Lakatos said, and he expects that to happen again in 2017, though he declined to provide any specific numbers. The company has more than 270 employees now.
