3D printing resin supplier Adaptive3D, headquartered in Dallas, Texas, has secured a Series A financing round. The round was co-led by DSM Venturing, the investment arm of Dutch multinational materials company Royal DSM, and technology venture capital specialist Applied Ventures, which is a branch of Applied Materials, Inc.
Full terms of the deal and the funds exchanged remain undisclosed however, according to DSM Venturing’s investment strategy, its first investment in a company is typically between €100 thousand to €5 million. Further, the typical investment for DSM over the lifetime of a venture is €1 million to €20 million.
With the backing of these two leading materials entities, Adaptive3D hopes to expand its global reach within industrial consumer, healthcare, transportation and oil & gas sectors.
High volume additive manufacturing
Adaptive3D was founded in 2014 by Walter Voit, an inventor and associate professor in materials science for the University of Texas at Dallas who is now the company’s President and CEO.
It’s vision, as stated on the Adaptive3D website, is “To enable high volume additive manufacturing through optimized materials.” This vision was initially put into practice by a project funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Following this, in 2015, the company became the recipient of a Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Science Foundation valued at over $730 thousand.
The age of materials
As presented at RAPID + TCT 2018, Adaptive3D’s core product is a resin called ToughRubberTM 30.450 tipped to be “the world’s highest-strain 3D-printable photopolymer.”
With this product, according to Voit, “Adaptive3D seeks to challenge the cost, throughput and performance in markets today dominated by traditional injection molding, blow molding and other thermoplastic processing techniques.”
Through Applied Ventures, Adaptive3D materials will be optimized for large scale 3D printing in a move that Applied Ventures President Om Nalamasu believes “could potentially deliver robust materials-based solutions at high throughput and low cost across multiple industry verticals.”
For Royal DSM, the VP of Additive Manufacturing Hugo Da Silva says, “[…] we believe that the age of additive manufacturing for industrial applications is, in fact, the age of materials,”
“Adaptive3D’s engineered photoresins enable new design paradigms in end applications.”
Joining DSM Venturing and Applied Ventures in this funding round are multinational materials and adhesives supplier Chemence, and current investors led by Mary McDermott Cook and the late Margaret McDermott, relatives of the founder of semiconductor manufacturer Texas Instruments.
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Featured image shows Walter Voit, PhD, and CEO of Adaptive3D. Photo via Adaptive3D.
