“We can’t make printers fast enough. It really bothers me because customers rely on these things.”
That’s the way Greg Mark, CEO and founder of 3D printing startup Markforged, illustrates his current situation. Having sold thousands of heavy-duty printers that can produce end-use parts out of materials ranging from metal to carbon fiber, the Cambridge startup’s revenue has grown over 300 percent in the last year. To accelerate that momentum, the company recently hired Jason Eubanks, a former sales executive at Twilio who helped usher the West Coast company through its initial public offering last year.
As the new chief revenue officer of Markforged, Eubanks will combine his 18 years of experience in building and leading go-to-market teams with his upbringing in a small town buoyed by the manufacturing industry — one of his internships was at his mother's company, a large food equipment provider. Before serving as global vice president of sales, services and alliances at Twilio, Eubanks had been a sales director at Cisco through the company’s 2011 acquisition of Meraki.
"Jason was a hard fish to land."
In an exclusive interview with BostInno, Mark said Eubanks has been hired to scale the company’s sales operation in the same way he has done for Twilio and Meraki. With Eubanks only in his fourth week on the job, Mark said his new CRO is already flying around meeting customers. Mark is clearly happy to point out he was able to recruit an executive from the West Coast.
“Jason was a hard fish to land,” Mark said. “Everyone wanted him.”
Markforged, which has 70 employees, is among the growing number of 3D printing startups in the Boston area, which includes Desktop Metal, which solely focuses on metal materials, and Formlabs, which focuses on plastic. All of these startups aim to provide faster and easier ways of creating materials, whether for prototyping or end-use products. Where Markforged stands out is its ability to produce tough, composite materials that have some pliability, giving them extra stability when force is applied. Its range of materials includes fiberglass, Kevlar, nylon, stainless steel and titanium.
The startup’s customers include GE, NASA, Google, the U.S. Air Force and Adidas. Other kinds of customers include breweries, automotive manufacturers and medical device manufacturers.
Once a customer buys one of Markforged’s printers, Mark said, 34 percent of them end up buying a second. The startup currently sells five printers between three products lines: the Onyx, which is made for desktop printing; the Mark, which is built for industrial-scale printing; and Metal X, its newest printer that focuses on metal materials. With each printer that has come out, Mark said, the Net Promoter Score has been higher, which has helped sell even more printers.
Mark said companies that buy a Markforged printer typically see a return on investment within three weeks. To illustrate the utility of the startup’s printers, Mark offered a scenario that one of his customers experienced a little while ago.
A German manufacturer of a subcomponent for CT scan machines had received a call from a customer in China that it needed a replacement part. Originally, the German manufacturer said it would take five weeks to create a new part using traditional manufacturing processes. But then a young engineer at the company pointed out that it could print out a temporary replacement part using its Markforged printer. After printing out the part and testing the material, the company sent it to the Chinese customer, and the part ended up being good enough to serve as a permanent replacement.
That changed the German company’s way of thinking and now it’s designing parts that it wouldn’t be able to make through traditional processes, such as CNC machining. It's that kind of transformative realization Markforged is banking on.
“They’re now designing parts that can only be printed,” Mark said.
