Supermaterial applications company Lyten has been named the primary filament supplier for American aerospace and defense company Modovolo’s BFP platform, a transportable 3D printer built to manufacture aerospace, motorsports, and defense-grade parts outside traditional factory settings. The companies announced the partnership as a joint push toward a fully domestic additive manufacturing supply chain, from raw material to finished part.
Modovolo’s BFP is a containerized, modular system designed to be deployed in remote or harsh environments without depending on outside supply chains, allowing large, complex components to be printed close to where they’re needed rather than shipped in from centralized factories. The platform has been tuned specifically to run on Lyten’s 3D Graphene-enhanced filament line, and PA1205 is now positioned as the default material across BFP installations.
Why Modovolo Picked PA1205
Modovolo built the BFP out of necessity: the company couldn’t find a US-made 3D printer fast or affordable enough to produce aerospace-grade components at the scale its own drone program required. That gap led it to develop an industrial-scale, US-sourced and US-manufactured printer from the ground up, then pair it with a filament capable of matching aerospace tolerances.
“We selected Lyten’s filaments for our BFP platform after an exhaustive search for high-performance materials,” said Justin Call, Modovolo’s CEO and co-founder. “Lyten’s PA1205 enables us to print stronger and lighter parts while maintaining a better print finish and speed vs competing products.”
The relationship predates this announcement. Modovolo has used Lyten filaments since 2025 to manufacture its Lift Quadcopter-X, a multi-payload drone built for commercial, first-responder, and defense applications, work that Call says fed directly into the BFP’s design.
Lyten and Modovolo plan to jointly showcase the BFP platform running on Lyten’s filaments at the Civil-Military Innovation Institute (CMI2), the Northern Strike military exercises, and additional aerospace and motorsports events throughout the year. The showcases target industries, aviation, automotive, industrial machinery, and defense, that require large, complex parts delivered under tight timelines and, increasingly, without reliance on overseas suppliers.
Inside the Material
PA1205 is a PA12 nylon-based filament infused with Lyten’s proprietary 3D Graphene, first launched in December 2025 at the Performance Racing Industry (PRI) Show alongside a companion product, the 6120HT high-temperature structural epoxy adhesive.
At launch, Lyten positioned PA1205 as a substitute for machined composites and metal parts in race hardware, long-range drones, and other components under heavy mechanical load, citing roughly 100% higher X- and Y-axis tensile strength and a 43% gain in Z-axis strength over PA12-carbon-fiber blends, figures that have since been refined to the +100% X-Y, +40% Z-axis, and +50% impact resistance numbers cited in this recent announcement.
Beyond raw strength, Lyten says the filament improves temperature performance and print speed while minimizing warping, without sacrificing dimensional accuracy, a combination the company argues lets manufacturers rethink not just what they print, but how they design and distribute production in the first place.
“Our goal is to prove better performing, better priced products can be both sourced and manufactured locally, creating supply chain resiliency and business model flexibility for customers,” said Dan Cook, Lyten’s CEO and co-founder. “We could not be more excited to integrate PA1205 into Modovolo’s BFP 3D printing platform to help scale their product globally.”
Reshoring Critical Manufacturing
The Lyten-Modovolo tie-up is a materials-to-hardware bet on the same thesis: that aerospace and defense customers will pay a premium to remove foreign dependency from their supply chains, not just their final assembly line. By controlling both the filament chemistry and the printer it runs on, the two companies are positioning BFP as an end-to-end domestic alternative to composite parts that have traditionally relied on imported carbon fiber and offshore machining, a pitch aimed squarely at Pentagon and industrial buyers now required, or strongly incentivized, to source domestically.
That pitch fits a pattern already well underway across US additive manufacturing. VulcanForms raised $220 million to expand domestic digital metal manufacturing as fragile global supply chains and geopolitical risk continue to constrain defense and aerospace production. On the polymer side, filament maker 3D-Fuel has expanded its U.S. manufacturing base as part of a wider trend of reshoring additive manufacturing infrastructure within the United States.
Defense-focused suppliers are making the same case directly to Congress. Beehive Industries‘ Chief Product Officer testified before a House Financial Services subcommittee hearing on securing the defense supply chain, arguing that domestic industrial capability is essential to reliable, timely production of critical components, the same national-security logic Lyten and Modovolo are leaning on by branding BFP as fully US-sourced and US-manufactured.
The message across all these deals is consistent: in additive manufacturing, reshoring is no longer a slogan, it’s a procurement requirement, and Lyten and Modovolo are betting that owning both ends of the material-to-part pipeline is what makes that requirement profitable.
3D Printing Industry is inviting speakers for its 2026 Additive Manufacturing Applications (AMA) series, covering Energy, Healthcare, Automotive and Mobility, Aerospace, Space and Defense, and Software. Each online event focuses on real production deployments, qualification, and supply chain integration. Practitioners interested in contributing can complete the call for speakers form here.
To stay up to date with the latest 3D printing news, don’t forget to subscribe to the 3D Printing Industry newsletter or follow us on LinkedIn.
Explore the full Future of 3D Printing and Executive Survey series from 3D Printing Industry, featuring perspectives from CEOs, engineers, and industry leaders on the industrialization of additive manufacturing, 3D printing industry trends 2026, qualification, supply chains, and additive manufacturing industry analysis.
Featured image shows Lyten’s 3D Graphene Filament Becomes Standard Material for Modovolo’s Modular Aerospace Printer. Image via Lyten.
