Our annual review of the 3D Printing Industry in 2025 begins today. January stands out not because of any single announcement, but because of how many competing signals appeared at once. Investment behavior shifted, new technologies surfaced, regulatory tensions increased, and long-running structural pressures became visible across multiple segments of the market.
Taken together, the news from January captured the industry in transition, before outcomes were clear but after direction had begun to solidify. January shows how these early signals developed into the defining storylines of the year.
Investment Discipline Replaces Speculation
One of the main focus of the month were the 3D printing investment trends 2025 showing an industry finally stepping out of its hype cycle. The $650M invested across roughly forty AM deals in 2024 reflects a market that has stabilised at lower, more realistic levels.
Interviews with VCs underline that funding incrementally better printers is no longer acceptable; investors want proof of reduced cost, shorter lead times or application-specific value. The continued crowding of events like Formnext, with more than 800 exhibitors, now highlights fragmentation rather than momentum, reinforcing that consolidation remains widely predicted even as past acquisitions struggled to create value.
Within this cautious landscape, defense-focused AM investment involving Firehawk Aerospace’s $60M Series C stands out because it shows where genuine growth still exists. Led by Donald Trump Jr’s 1789 Capital with participation from Draper Associates, Boka Capital and Point Bridge Capital, the round reflects a defense sector expanding even while other AM markets contract.
Firehawk’s ability to 3D print solid rocket fuel in hours instead of the weeks or months required for traditional casting directly addresses a US shortage of solid rocket motors. Combined with the political alignment of its investors and ongoing DoD partnerships, the company sits inside one of the few AM segments with both immediate demand and rising budgets.
The CONTEXT global additive manufacturing market report confirms the broader slowdown. Industrial printer shipments fell 24% Y/Y in Q3 2024, midrange systems declined 8% Y/Y and professional systems slipped 1%, while layoffs, CEO turnover and delayed capex formed the backdrop. A few firms such as EOS, Eplus3D and Renishaw recorded revenue growth, but these were exceptions within a contracting market.
Election-year uncertainty slowed some defense contract timing, yet missile replenishment efforts continued to support metal AM. These stories frame January as the point where the industry accepts disciplined growth, investors reward evidence over ambition and defense emerges as the only consistently expanding pillar.
Industry Bifurcation Becomes Visible
January revealed how the weak conditions of 2024 were translating into structural consequences through a 3D printing company asset auction. Diamond Age’s sale of 350+ lots of equipment, spanning industrial robots, CNC machinery, assembly systems and office infrastructure, made those pressures visible.
The sale signalled that a company which had raised $58M between 2021 and 2022 and delivered residential builds as well as a 2023 bunker agreement for Ukraine was now liquidating rather than restructuring. The scope of the sale marked one of the first visible casualties of the downturn.
Set against this contraction, an industrial 3D printer installation milestone achieved by EOS for its 5,000th industrial printer at Keselowski Advanced Manufacturing (KAM) showed that steady industrial adoption continued. EOS systems reached customers on six continents, and KAM expanded to 18 machines as demand in defense, space, and medical sectors sustained slow, incremental growth.
The month also saw Desktop Metal escalate its conflict with Nano Dimension by filing a second lawsuit that added Markforged as a defendant, arguing that Nano’s $115M deal for Markforged threatened completion of their planned $183M Desktop Metal and Nano Dimension merger. With an expedited trial set for late February 2025 and board turmoil at Nano, the 3D printing industry legal dispute emerged early in the year as a strategic tool for mid-tier firms navigating the aftermath of the biggest AM merger and acquisitions (M&A) saga.
Desktop Sector Trust Fractures
Two separate flashpoints in January exposed rising tension in the desktop 3D printing community.
The Prusa 3DBenchy controversy unfolded after the removal of 3DBenchy remixes from Printables, triggered by a third-party report and not by IP owner NTI Group despite widespread speculation, reignited long-standing anxieties around IP control, community norms and the commercialisation of shared benchmarks. What appeared on the surface to be routine license enforcement quickly became a symbolic dispute over ownership, identity and the direction of the hobbyist ecosystem.
Attention then shifted to firmware and control. The Bambu Lab firmware security update prompted a global debate over security, privacy and access, even as the company stressed the changes were optional and intended to counter cyberattacks.
Critics including Josef Prusa and Nick Sonnentag warned the move reflected a broader shift toward closed ecosystems and reduced user autonomy, while the subsequent extraction of Bambu Connect’s X.509 certificate and key by a Reddit user intensified concerns around data handling and manufacturer authority.
By January’s end, trust between users and desktop printer vendors had clearly surfaced as a defining issue for the year ahead.
AI Becomes a Core Force
Tencent’s release of Hunyuan3D 2.0 marked the first major AI storyline of January. The company introduced a corporate-scale system for AI-powered 3D asset generation, for producing geometry and textures through its DiT and Paint models, raising concerns about training data provenance, the displacement of 3D designers, shifts in design labour and China’s accelerating role in automated asset creation.
At the same time, AI 3D model generation startup Backflip emerged from stealth with $30M from a16z and NEA, offering an American counter-model built by Markforged founders Greg Mark and David Benhaim to turn text and photo prompts into 3D printable parts in minutes using a new neural representation.
Together these launches showed that competing approaches to AI-driven design were already taking shape, setting January as the starting point for a theme that would become mainstream, regulatory and economically disruptive by year’s end.
Regulation, Control and Platform Politics
January extended the regulatory storyline into the question of what can legally be produced and shared, pushing the 3D printed firearms regulation debate back into focus.
A report from the Global Network on Extremism & Technology identified the Urutau as a significant shift in 3D printed firearms, lowering barriers through a simplified design, fully printable components and unusually detailed build and operational security documentation. Paired with a manifesto advocating a global “New Second Amendment,” the design sharpened tensions around open-source ethics, online dissemination, legal versus illegal use cases and uneven global firearms regulation.
Control over information flow surfaced simultaneously from a different direction as a US ban on TikTok approached. Interviews with manufacturers and 3D printing influencers on TikTok ban showed how political decisions, platform governance and algorithmic control shaped creator reach, community cohesion and commercial survival.
Framed as a national security issue tied to data access and foreign influence, the ban underscored how digital platforms increasingly functioned as critical infrastructure for AM communities.
January as the Year’s Foundation
Looking back, January set the contours for 2025. Capital discipline, uneven demand and early consolidation signaled a more constrained economic environment, while defense remained the clearest source of growth. At the same time, AI accelerated design workflows and regulatory pressure expanded across hardware, software and platforms.
Community trust issues and legal conflict underscored that progress would be contested rather than smooth. The rest of the year largely unfolded within the limits, tensions, and contradictions that were already visible at the very start.
Read more in our series looking at the 3D printing news for 2025, plus how did additive manufacturing expert forecasts match the reality of the year?
3D Printing Forecasts vs Reality 2025
Additive Manufacturing in 2025 Executive Summary – Part One
Additive Manufacturing in 2025 Executive Summary – Part Two
3D Printing Industry Review of the Year January 2025
3D Printing Industry Review of the Year February 2025
3D Printing Industry Review of the Year March 2025
3D Printing Industry Review of the Year April 2025
3D Printing Industry Review of the Year May 2025
3D Printing Industry Review of the Year June 2025
3D Printing Industry Review of the Year July 2025
3D Printing Industry Review of the Year August 2025
3D Printing Industry Review of the Year September 2025
3D Printing Industry Review of the Year October 2025
3D Printing Industry Review of the Year November 2025
3D Printing Industry Review of the Year December 2025
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Featured image shows Canary Wharf. Photo by Michael Petch.
