This week 3D Printing Industry joins the additive manufacturing world in Frankfurt for the return of one of the major events on the calendar – Formnext.
A vital component of the expo is the annual start-up challenge, with winners selected for free participation in the trade show including a pitch event on Day One. All week we will be profiling the winners. Today Robert Haleluk, Founder & CEO at PrintParts introduces PrintParts.
3DPI: When was your company founded and where are operations based?
Robert Haleluk, Founder & CEO at PrintParts: We founded PrintParts in 2016 as an additive service provider offering advanced manufacturing solutions from our headquarters in NYC.
3DPI: Can you tell us more about your team’s background and experience with AM?
RH: Our team has extensive experience in business leadership, industrial manufacturing including injection molding and CNC machining, product development, additive software, and 3D Printing.
My background is primarily in injection molding and traditional manufacturing. I started experimenting with additive technologies and fell in love with the whole industry, and I made the full switch over when I founded PrintParts.
We began building out a team to develop our SmartParts authentication and traceability solution in early 2020, first with my co-founder Cody Burke who has been in the industry for 10 years, mostly at Stratasys. Since then, we have added several other key people, including our Chief Product Officer Ashley Kerth, who spent several years at HP, Autodesk, Oqton, and Hexagon, as well as our Director of Marketing, Aundera Schroder, who led marketing efforts at Link3D.
3DPI: What does your company do?
RH: PrintParts began as an additive service provider focused on production applications for customers in aerospace, defense, automotive, medical, and industrial machinery. SmartParts is our first technology offering, and we are excited to introduce this unique solution to the industry.
SmartParts is an integrated solution from PrintParts that consists of intelligent materials, scanning hardware, and cloud software to connect digital manufacturing data to physical parts. Our solution completes the Digital Thread by embedding a unique signature within every part to make it scannable, verifiable, and cloud-connected.
3DPI: How does your company fit into the additive manufacturing ecosystem?
RH: As a production-focused service provider, we have deep connections to both our customers, as well as the industry OEM’s, material companies, and software vendors. This unique positioning informs our production development and allows us to tailor our SmartParts solution to directly address the major pain points that our industry faces around creating and maintain quality records, verifying source of origin for materials, and traceability.
Ultimately, the goal of SmartParts is to help facilitate the adoption of additive for production applications by providing a traceability and authentication solution that allows customers to integrate additive processes into their existing production operations.
3DPI: How would you describe the roadmap for your enterprise in the coming years?
RH: 2021 is set to be an exciting year for us, as we bring our solution to market and roll out our first beta program in the first half of the year.
We are actively developing partnerships and collaborations with leading OEMs, material companies, and software vendors to introduce SmartParts as a new standard for material authentication and traceability in the additive industry.
We will be adding additional team members as we scale, so will be looking to bring on board application engineers, material scientists, and product development resources.
3DPI: Is there anything else you would like our readers to know?
RH: We created SmartParts as an industry wide, technology agnostic solution. We truly believe that rising tides lift all boats, and that our technology can remove barriers that have been holding back organizations from adopting additive for production applications. Our solution is a key enabler of Digital Transformation and Industry 4.0 initiatives, and we would love to connect with new potential partners and customers that can benefit from true end-to-end traceability.
Please reach out if you would like to learn more about our solution!
Meet the Formnext Start-up Challenge 2021 Winners
If you attending Formnext, make sure you visit the Start-up Area (Hall 12.0, B81). The official award ceremony is to take place on Tuesday, 16 November 2021 from 3:00 p.m. on Formnext’s AM4U stage (Hall 11.0, E72).
The 3D Printing Industry will be in Frankfurt all week, so make sure you say hello if you see us!
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Featured image shows a scanner detecting SmartPart and retrieving manufacturing data from SmartParts cloud software. Photo via PrintParts.
