Buffalo-based PostProcess Technologies is raising millions as it continues on the road to profitability.
The company, which develops solutions for the additive manufacturing industry, recently raised an $18 million Series C funding round. About $12 million came from previous debt that converted to equity, and $6 million is new equity.
“We had very strong support from our existing investors, many here in Buffalo,” CEO Jeff Mize said.
The company, founded in 2014, has $2 million more before it hits cap on the Series C round, and Mize said he expects to raise those additional funds based on investor interest.
The round was backed by investors including Chuck Lannon, co-founder of the company that became Life Storage, who now resides in Florida; and New York Ventures, a division of Empire State Development.
The funds will go toward PostProcess continuing to drive top-line revenue growth, improve its gross margins by optimizing its solutions’ designs and getting its next technology into production.
Variable Acoustic Displacement, the company’s fifth technology family, is a depowdering technology that’s been in the works for about four years. Ohio-based Libra Industries is the contract manufacturer that will build the product solution.
PostProcess already has a backlog of orders for VAD and expects to be shipping to customers by the end of Q3 or early Q4.
The company also projects it will hit profitability by Q3 2025, and in May got its 500th customer. The business is also retaining 98% of its customers, Mize said.
“We’re super fortunate to have a great team that continues to deliver exceptional customer satisfaction,” he said.
The company this year projects year-over-year top-line growth of more than 30% and gross margin expansion of 20%, according to Mize.
Part of the business strategy has been sizing the company to service a prototyping market, rather than prepping for production applications, which pre-Covid were expected to be “plentiful” by now.
The company has rightsized its staff to about 43 and is reducing its 21,500 square feet of space at Tri-Main Center by about 6,000 square feet.
“We now have the company sized to service a prototyping market and we’re well positioned from a patent perspective and from a technology perspective to capitalize on production applications,” Mize said. “But we’re not going to start rebuilding the infrastructure to support that production applications until we start getting multiple (purchase orders) for the higher volume production applications.”
PostProcess Technologies is the 12th local company to announce the closing of a private, growth-oriented round of funding this year. The list includes Strideful ($100,000), EmergenceTek Group ($100,000), Circular.eco ($100,000), Immersed Games ($100,000), Edenesque ($175,000), TeleSafety ($230,000), Top Seedz ($750,000), SelectFI ($4.5 million), MimiVax ($5.8 million),PostProcess Technologies ($17.7 million), Ognomy ($6.8 million) and CleanFiber ($28 million).
