Freeform, a trailblazer in metal additive manufacturing, has raised $14 million from NVIDIA and Boeing to develop an advanced 3D metal printing platform that aims to tackle persistent issues of cost, speed, and quality control in the industry. This investment brings critical backing and resources to a system that, according to co-founder and CEO Erik Palitsch, “changes the game.”
The company’s innovative platform, a closed-loop metal additive printing system, integrates real-time monitoring and high-speed AI capabilities to create precise, high-quality metal parts. Palitsch and TJ Ronacher, Freeform’s president, both former SpaceX engineers, observed firsthand the potential of metal 3D printing at scale, as well as the industry’s limitations in quality consistency and cost. To tackle these issues, they envisioned a shift from selling printers to offering a managed printing service. Alongside Tasso Lappas, former CTO of Velo3D, they founded Freeform with a core mission to revolutionize metal printing.
Palitsch expressed that printing with metal should be transformative, yet adoption has been slow due to issues in quality, speed, and cost. He added that with Freeform, they are “building an automated factory from a clean sheet to address these challenges.”
A key feature of Freeform’s system is a closed-loop feedback mechanism enabled by AI-driven sensors and high-speed computer vision, which monitors each print job at microsecond intervals. Palitsch explained that they have real-time feedback running at microsecond scale, processed on cutting-edge FPGAs and GPUs, and emphasized that Freeform had to develop these components in-house, as no existing solutions could meet the demands of high-speed metal additive manufacturing.
At the heart of this platform is a machine-learning model that rapidly adjusts printing parameters to ensure high accuracy and efficiency. Lappas, co-founder and CTO, described the platform’s unique capability, saying their inference needs to happen in microseconds to close the loop on these processes and noting that they had to build an AI system from scratch to manage that. This process not only enables superior quality control but also allows Freeform to amass one of the most extensive metal additive datasets in the industry, a resource that has drawn interest from aerospace and defense giants like Boeing.
The recent $14 million funding, which includes technical and operational support from NVIDIA and Boeing, enables Freeform to expand its operations and refine its next-generation printers. NVIDIA’s investment provides access to high-performance computing hardware, while Boeing’s involvement aids in navigating supplier qualifications, setting the stage for Freeform’s larger-scale commercial rollouts.
