James
Hedrick

Ask most people what 3D printing is for and they will tell you: prototypes, trinkets, a bracket for the thing that broke. James Hedrick spends his days trying to delete that sentence from the language. As co-founder and CEO of Azul 3D, a deep-tech company tucked into Skokie, Illinois, his ambition is not a better hobbyist machine. It is a printer that can look injection molding in the eye and compete on speed, on strength, and on the cold arithmetic of cost per part.

That is a strange goal, because for decades resin 3D printing has been the tortoise of manufacturing - precise, pretty, and painfully slow. Every layer had to peel off the bottom of a vat before the next could form. Scale the part up and the machine got hotter, stickier, and slower. The physics fought back.

Hedrick's answer, developed during his PhD at Northwestern University in the lab of nanotechnology pioneer Chad Mirkin, is a technology called HARP - High Area Rapid Printing. The trick is almost comically simple to describe and fiendishly hard to build: run a thin film of flowing, non-stick liquid across the interface where the part forms. The liquid carries away the heat and refuses to let the resin cling. Take away the sticking and the heat, and the printer stops slowing itself down.

The result was published in the journal Science in 2019. The prototype stood about 13 feet tall, printed onto a 2.5-square-foot bed, and pushed out roughly half a yard of finished part per hour. In a field that measures progress in millimeters, that was a land grab. Azul 3D, which Hedrick co-founded in 2017 with Mirkin and fellow researcher David Walker, exists to turn that lab result into a machine that earns its keep on a shop floor.

Here is the detail that tells you everything: he started his first company at 16, and the profits paid his tuition at MIT. Most teenagers who build a business get a story to tell at dinner. Hedrick got a balance sheet that funded an engineering degree.

At MIT he was also an NCAA student athlete, which means he was training, competing, studying chemical engineering, and running a company - presumably while the rest of us were choosing a major. It is a useful lens for reading the founder he became: comfortable carrying several hard things at once, allergic to the idea that you must pick just one.

From MIT he went to Northwestern for a PhD in chemical and biological engineering, arriving in 2013 and finishing in 2019 in Mirkin's group. Along the way he collected the kind of credentials that fund serious research - a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate fellowship and a Ryan fellowship - and authored 16 peer-reviewed papers plus a stack of patents.

But the through-line was never the trophy case. It was the same instinct at 16 and at 26: find the thing people assume is impossible, then quietly build the version that works. HARP was that thing. And unlike a lot of academic breakthroughs that live and die inside a journal, Hedrick walked his out the door and gave it a company.

Getting there meant crossing the ugliest gap in technology - the one between a result that works once on a lab bench and a machine a customer will actually pay for and rely on. That crossing has killed more brilliant science than any peer reviewer. It demands a founder who can hold a soldering iron and a fundraising deck in the same week, who can talk resin viscosity with an engineer and unit economics with an investor. The teenager who ran a company while training for NCAA competition and studying chemical engineering had, in a sense, been rehearsing for exactly this for years.

Co-founding with Mirkin gave the venture something rare: credibility on day one. Mirkin is not a garden-variety academic advisor - he is a named professor and the director of a major nanotechnology institute, the kind of scientist whose signature on a company opens doors. But credibility is not a product. Someone had to run toward customers, hire, ship, and answer for the roadmap. That someone was Hedrick.

Notice the naming. LAKE, then OCEAN. Each machine bigger than the last, each name a promise about scale. It is a small piece of showmanship from a founder who understands that selling hard tech is half physics and half narrative. You do not raise $42.5 million by explaining thermal gradients. You raise it by making people believe the ocean is next.

Much of the current work is chemistry, not just hardware. Azul 3D develops UV-curable thermosets - materials that expand what a printer can actually make into durable end-use parts rather than brittle demos. Hedrick took that message to a NASA symposium in 2024, framing custom materials as the real key to widespread adoption. The machine is the headline. The resin is the plot.

Injection molding is one of the quiet giants of the modern world. Almost every plastic object you touched today came out of a steel mold that cost tens of thousands of dollars and weeks of lead time to make. It is astonishingly cheap per part once you are running - and brutally expensive and slow to start. Change the design and you start over. That tradeoff has shaped what products exist and which ideas never got built.

The promise buried inside Hedrick's work is that you could keep the speed and volume of molding while throwing away the mold. No tooling. No four-week wait to see if the part is right. Change the file, print the new version, run it again by lunch. If that sounds incremental, consider that it would quietly rewire how factories decide what is worth making at all.

That is why a resin printer with flowing oil in it is not really a story about resin or oil. It is a story about who gets to manufacture things, and how fast an idea can travel from a screen to a physical object you can hold. Hedrick tends to talk in those terms - throughput, economy of scale, end-use parts - the vocabulary of someone who has decided that "cool demo" is an insult.

There is also something telling in how he frames the remaining problem. Not the machine. The materials. The bottleneck to adoption, he argued at NASA in 2024, is having the right custom chemistries - UV-curable thermosets tough enough to be real parts, not display pieces. It is a characteristically unglamorous answer from a founder who seems to enjoy pointing at the boring thing that actually matters and saying: that. That is the hard part. Let's go build it.

He has been doing versions of that since he was 16, invoicing customers to cover a tuition bill. The scale is different now - a company, a category, a claim on the future of manufacturing - but the move is the same one it has always been.