Google Ventures, the corporate venturing arm of internet company Google, led a $100m series C round for US-based 3D printing company Carbon3D yesterday, indicating the increasing interest in the sector.
The round also included payment technology provider FIS, venture capital fund Reinet Fund, entrepreneur Yuri Milner and all the company’s earlier investors, including architecture software provider Autodesk, Sequoia Capital, Silver Lake Kraftwerk and Northgate Capital.
Founded in 2013, Carbon3D’s Continuous Liquid Interface Production (CLIP) technology eschews the traditional mechanical approach to 3D printing, instead favouring a tuneable photochemical process it claims can manufacture objects from 3D models up to 100 times faster than traditional methods using a variety of engineering-grade materials.
The technology has not yet been made commercially available but Carbon3D had worked to refine it with companies from the automotive, consumer electronics, aerospace, athletic apparel and industrial product industries.
Carbon3D received $10m in April 2015 from Autodesk’s Spark Investment Fund, capital that will be converted to equity in the series C round. It has not revealed details of its earlier funding from Sequoia, Northgate and Silver Lake Kraftwerk, but said it has now raised $141m altogether.
The funding represents the first $100m round to be closed by a 3D printing technology developer and shows that although the sector has not yet made significant inroads in the venture capital space, it is one of the more promising emerging areas,
3D printing companies to secure funding in the past three months include 3D metal printer manufacturer MatterFab, 3D printing services and financing supplier Prodways and 3D printing service provider Shapeways.
There is also corporate support for the sector. In addition to Google Ventures, Autodesk is also an investor in Carbon3D, and the $100m Spark Investment Fund, formed in October 2014, is poised to back a range of companies in a bid to support Autodesk’s Spark 3D printing software.
General Electric, Sumitomo and Hewlett Packard are among the companies to have invested in 3D printing startups of late, and their positions in the market, spanning industrial production and computing, give hints as to where future corporate investment in the sector could come.
The fact Carbon3D has managed to break the nine-figure mark in a funding round is significant, but perhaps less so than the technology itself.
Not only does CLIP make the process fast enough to facilitate mass production of goods, the wide range of materials it can use considerably expands its potential uses meaning plastics for instance could hypothetically be produced in shapes hitherto impossible to achieve.
Andy Wheeler, general partner at Google Ventures, said: “Carbon3D’s printing technology is an order of magnitude faster than existing technologies.
“Carbon3D’s technology has the potential to dramatically expand the 3D printing market beyond where it stands today and reshape the manufacturing landscape.”
The breakthrough in both variety and speed could well mark the watershed between the current state of the sector, which is currently made up solely of promising technology that is still in the prototype stage, and its future, where 3D printing is used as a widespread industrial manufacturing technique.
Carbon3D is looking to ensure that step takes place sooner rather than later, and it plans to begin selling industrial size printers to manufacturers later this year.
– Photo courtesy of Carbon3D, Inc.