Formlabs CEO on the state of 3D printing and its remaining challenges

3D printing isn’t the buzzy, hype-tastic topic it was just a few years ago — at least not with consumers. 3D printing news out of CES last week seemed considerably quieter than years prior; the physical booths for many 3D printing companies I saw took up fractions of the footprints they did just last year. Tapered, it seems, are the dreams of a 3D printer in every home.

In professional production environments, however, 3D printing remains a crucial tool. Companies big and small tap 3D printing to design and test new concepts, creating one-off prototypes in-house at a fraction of the cost and time compared to going back-and-forth with a factory. Sneaker companies are using it to create new types of shoe soles from experimental materials. Dentists are using it to create things like dentures and bridges in-office, in hours rather than days.

One of the companies that has long focused on pushing 3D printing into production is Formlabs, the Massachusetts-based team behind the aptly named Form series of pro-grade desktop 3D printers. The company launched its first product in 2012 after raising nearly $3 million on Kickstarter; by 2018, it was raising millions at a valuation of over a billion dollars.

I got a chance to catch up with Formlabs co-founder and CEO Maxim Lobovsky at CES, where he outlined how the company has grown, what it’s focusing on today and what he sees as the Holy Grail project in the industry.

Here’s our chat, edited for brevity and clarity:

TechCrunch: By my count, you started Formlabs about nine, 10 years ago.

Maxim Lobovsky: Yeah — we started in the middle of 2011, so approaching nine years.

So what’s changed?

We’ve grown a lot.

We started with just a few people fresh out of school, and we raised a small amount of money to build the prototype and launch on Kickstarter. We were hoping just to get anything that anyone wanted — to just get anywhere with it.

Now we’ve got about 600 people worldwide, we’re on the third generation of the main product (the Form 3) and we’ve expanded into a huge range of materials. We’ve got other products coming, like the 3L (a larger format printer) and Fuse 1 (another type of printer that users selective laser sintering technology), and we’re working in all sorts of different fields, like product development, manufacturing, dental, medical, jewelry.

Now it feels like we’re not just trying to make just any product that someone might want — we’re really trying to change the world with the products we make. We’re trying to reach a scale where everyone’s using… well, maybe not everyone’s using a 3D printer, but where everyone’s using products made with a 3D printer.

Just walking around here [at CES], it seems like there’s been a little bit of a shift away from consumer 3D printing. Is consumer 3D printing, at-home 3D printing, really still a thing that anybody is shooting for?

It never was a thing, and at this point, it’s not really a thing anyone’s shooting for anymore.

When we got started in 2011, that was sort of the beginning of this consumer printing hype wave, which I would say peaked in 2013 or 2014. We were actually the first company to say we want to make a desktop, affordable printer… but it’s going to be for professionals.

Between [this idea of] hundreds of millions of printers in everyone’s home, and where we actually were in the industry at the time — with just a few thousand printers in the world — there’s a bunch of steps. And the first step is just to get it to every professional out there who’s involved in 3D design and make it easy to use and affordable. Make it more like using a 2D printer. If you want something printed on paper, you don’t really think about the cost, or the process… you press print, and you get it.

3D printing wasn’t there, and it’s still not really there. We’re taking steps toward that, but yeah — I think the wave of hype around consumer printing has passed.

You recently launched the Form 3B, a printer purpose-built for dentistry. Do you think you’ll do more vertically focused printers like that?

It’s a good question. Generally we want to take an Apple approach, where we have as few products as possible covering as much of the market [as possible].

But in some places, the customers really want different materials, different capabilities, different pricing, or service, or sales. In dental/medical that’s what they want, but we don’t have immediate plans to do a lot more — we like to be able to put all of our R&D into as few products as possible, so we can really refine them and make them excellent.

Maybe it means we won’t make a printer for everyone, but we think we can cover most of the market.

Where is 3D printing going from here? Any major developments on the horizon?

There are two big directions we’ve been working in for the last couple years.

One is materials. Especially with stereolithography [the process most of Formlabs’ machines use to print, in which beams of light are used to precisely harden UV-sensitive resin], you can make the geometry, you’ve got great detail and resolution… but you can’t always get the material properties you need to make the parts that you want. Maybe you want stronger materials, or, like in the case of printing shoes, you need really good robustness to be able to survive all that cycling.

So developing new materials is a big focus. We have more than 30 people involved in materials development and we own the factory where we make our materials — so we’re investing a lot there.

The other big area is bringing the cost per part down. People are excited about mass-producing things with 3D printing… but the reality is that it’s typically a lot more expensive to produce something with 3D printing than it would be with other kinds of mass-production methods, like injection molding. You can bring that cost down, then 3D printing will start to become relevant for a lot more applications.

Do you think it could actually shift? Where 3D printing is cheaper than, say, injection molding?

It already is, in some cases!

If you want to make 10 of something, it definitely is. If you want to make 100 of something, it usually is. If you want to make 1,000 of something… sometimes it is. There’s kind of this curve. In low volume, 3D printing is better; in high volume, injection molds are better.

But the more cost-effective we make 3D printing, the more we can push out that curve, and the more cases there are where 3D printing makes sense. So that’s what we’re trying to do.

Speaking of materials… have there ever been any theoretical dream materials that you’ve never managed to crack? Things you wanted to be able to make, but can’t?

The Holy Grail, especially for stereolithography-type printers, is a really strong, durable, general-purpose material with good temperature properties — just kind of a well-rounded material.

We can make a material that’s got some good properties in different areas. We can make a really high-temperature material, or a really stiff material, or a really robust material… but it’s hard to get all of those in one. So that’s sort of the Holy Grail.

Beyond a material like that, what are the remaining challenges around 3D printing?

The materials, and the cost per part thing… that’s really about pushing 3D printing into production. But even with our original mission of making 3D printing more accessible to professionals, we’ve made progress… but we’re still nowhere near that, like, office 2D printer where you just press “print” and you don’t worry about it.

So we’ve got to make it more reliable, more easy to use, with more automation through software so you don’t need any knowledge to use it. [We need] more sensing built-in; with this generation, we added a lot of sensors to detect issues you might have while printing, and to adjust what the printer is doing to work around that and make sure you get a good result. Or, if it doesn’t work, the printer can just tell you what’s wrong and what you need to do.

That’s still a big direction: make it more accessible, to get 3D printing to more people.

I know the Form 3 is still pretty new — but will we see a Form 4?

I think there’s so much more we can do. I think we’re far from the point where we would say, “Okay, this technology is mature, and there’s nothing more to do”… so it’s a pretty safe bet that you’ll see more from us.

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