BigRep GmbH’s parent company BigRep SE has agreed to sell its entire stake in the operating subsidiary to three holding companies and wind down the listed entity entirely.
The buyers, De Krassny GmbH, Koehler Invest GmbH, and HAGE Holding GmbH, are not outside parties. All three were already embedded in BigRep SE’s shareholder and creditor structure before the deal was announced.
To understand why, it helps to trace how the listed company came to exist in the first place. BigRep entered the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (FSE) on July 31, 2024 through a reverse merger with SMG Technology Acceleration SE, a Luxembourg-based SPAC. The combined entity listed under the ticker B1GR at an initial share price of €11.20. By August 28 of the same year, the stock had already fallen to €5.00.
The Road to Liquidation
The listing itself was the culmination of an acquisition-led strategy that BigRep had been building toward since late 2023. In November of that year, BigRep acquired HAGE3D, adding a Graz facility to its existing operations in Berlin, Boston, Shanghai, and Singapore. The combined installed base at the time of that deal exceeded 1,000 printers. HAGE Holding is now among the buyers taking the combined business private.
Weeks after the acquisition closed, BigRep signed a non-binding letter of intent with SMG Technology Acceleration, setting the SPAC merger in motion, and eventually debuting on FSE. The stated ambition was to build a European AM champion through further acquisitions, using public market access to fund a buy-and-build expansion.
That strategy did not produce the results management had projected. Revenue fell from €11.2 million in 2023 to €6.3 million in 2024 while adjusted EBITDA worsened from -€5.0 million to -€11.8 million over the same period. By 2025, the company had entered a formal reorganization process. De Krassny GmbH and HAGE Holding GmbH, by then already major shareholders, injected €3.2 million through a capital increase as part of that restructuring.
Koehler Invest GmbH separately repaid a €1.8 million shareholder loan to provide additional liquidity. The same three firms that tried to keep the listed company alive are now acquiring the operating business from what remains of it.
None of that was enough to stabilize BigRep SE. On June 29, 2026, its management board and supervisory board approved the sale of all shares in BigRep GmbH to those same three firms. The sale price will be determined by an independent valuation at fair market value, though no figure has been disclosed.
Once the sale closes, BigRep SE intends to enter voluntary liquidation under Luxembourg’s 1915 commercial companies law, appoint a liquidator to work through remaining assets and liabilities, and delist from the FSE’s regulated market.
Any surplus remaining after that process will be distributed to shareholders, though no estimate of what that might amount to has been provided. An extraordinary general meeting must first approve the sale, and only then can the same meeting vote to open the liquidation. BigRep SE has not announced a date for that meeting.
The result is that BigRep GmbH, the operating entity that actually makes the printers, continues under new ownership. What is being liquidated is the holding structure built around it.
The episode raises questions about whether the SPAC route was ever the right financing mechanism for a business of BigRep’s size and market position. An industrial manufacturer with over 1,000 machines in the field and a genuine customer base is a different kind of company from the high-growth vehicle the Frankfurt listing implied it would become. The gap between those two elements appears in part to be behind the liquidation.
A Familiar SPAC-Era Pattern
The difficulty BigRep faced as a public company was not unique to BigRep. When additive manufacturing companies went public through SPAC mergers, they inherited valuations priced for aggressive growth in a market that has consistently rewarded patience over scale.
For instance, Desktop Metal, which listed via SPAC in 2020, never closed the gap between its public valuation and its actual revenue trajectory. Nano Dimension acquired it for $179.3 million, and Desktop Metal filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, with its foreign subsidiaries selling to an affiliate of Anzu Partners. Markforged, another SPAC-era listing, was acquired by Nano Dimension for $116 million and is now being sold to Stratasys for $42.5 million.
What these cases have in common is that the operating businesses or their industrial assets retained value even as the listed entities failed to deliver the growth investors had expected. BigRep’s liquidation is smaller in scale and differs in execution, but it reflects similar pressures additive manufacturing companies have faced that entered public markets through SPAC mergers.
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Featured image shows BigRep at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Photo via BigRep.
