Philip DeSimone and the trouble with a perfect prototype

In 2013, Philip DeSimone went to a trade show in Pittsburgh and found an awkward gap between what an industry promised and what its machines could do. The promise was personal manufacturing, perhaps even a printer in every home. The machines were slow. Their materials were limited. The future had arrived with a rather long estimated delivery time.

He had not set out to join this particular future. His father, Joseph DeSimone, and the other founders of Carbon needed help getting their company started. Philip agreed, despite some reluctance. Curiosity followed. At the trade show, he could see both the attraction of the technology and the practical reasons it had failed to fulfill its billing. Carbon would have to address speed and materials together.

That beginning makes his subsequent career more interesting than a tidy story about inheriting a family enthusiasm. His contribution would be commercial: finding customers, building partnerships and helping turn a scientific proposition into something a manufacturer could actually use. A beautiful sample is persuasive. A customer ordering another production run is persuasive in a different, more expensive way.

Business school, with a detour through shopping

DeSimone graduated from Ursinus College in 2012. The college describes his studies as Business and Economics and Politics. Carbon’s biography describes his BA as business and econometrics. The consistent thread is a business education, rather than the chemistry background associated with his father. Before Carbon, he co-founded the ecommerce business Buystand and served as its vice president of business development.

In an alumni conversation about footwear, he traced his education through the people who taught him, naming professors across his college experience. He also offered students some permission to reconsider their plans. Changing your mind during a degree was acceptable; discovering work you disliked could help you find work you wanted. His own path makes that advice feel usefully unpolished. There was shopping before manufacturing, hesitation before commitment.

At Carbon, he became responsible for relationships that would give the technology a route into the world. His earlier roles included vice president of business development and chief customer officer. The college credits him with helping build partnerships with adidas and Riddell and cultivating customer relationships including Ford and BMW. In January 2016, he appeared on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list for manufacturing and industry. He was 26.

A shoe has to leave the display case

A running shoe makes an unusually demanding calling card. People can admire its geometry on a table, then put it on and subject it to the much less diplomatic judgment of their feet. In April 2017, adidas unveiled Futurecraft 4D, with midsoles made using Carbon’s Digital Light Synthesis process. The partnership brought the manufacturing argument into a familiar object.

The midsole design used running data to create functional zones for cushioning, stability and comfort. Light, oxygen-permeable optics and liquid resin were part of the production method. The finished structure could combine different responses within one component. The interesting question was becoming what a designer could make the shoe do, rather than simply whether a printer could produce its shape.

The launch announcement laid out an ambition to exceed 100,000 pairs by the end of 2018. That number was a target, not a tally. But it explains the scale of the wager. For DeSimone, whose work centered on partnerships, a brand committing to consumer production changed the conversation. A printed object had acquired a place in a commercial plan, complete with the expectations that accompany one.

The customer brings the difficult bit

The Riddell relationship carried the same idea into a different setting. In February 2019, Riddell announced its SpeedFlex Precision Diamond helmet with a digitally manufactured lattice liner. Its fitting process used head scans, and Carbon developed a resin for the application. Selected NFL players had already used the helmets during the 2018 season; limited commercial availability at the elite level was planned for 2019.

Here the partnership required several pieces to agree: the scan, the geometry, the material, the printer and the manufacturing process. It is easy to say a product should be personal. Making the production system accommodate that personal information requires rather more cooperation.

The work also needed manufacturers. In December 2019, OECHSLER visited Carbon to begin a project with Riddell for the commercial launch of its SpeedFlex Diamond helmet. The delivery window was three months. Less than 100 days after that initial meeting, serial production began. The case illustrates the terrain DeSimone’s customer work occupied: a deadline, several companies and the obligation to make another part that behaved like the last one.

The factory behind the photograph

By 2019, DeSimone was comfortable admitting that Carbon’s growth had involved luck. Timing mattered, he said; good technology could fail if it arrived at the wrong moment. He dated his stronger conviction about the company’s prospects to around 2016, several years after its founding. The certainty had developed along the way.

He was also describing a less photogenic obstacle. When customers wanted to expand production, the surrounding manufacturing ecosystem had to be built. Contract manufacturers needed to learn how to establish a digital production facility and handle its resins. Carbon could develop a printer and still have a great deal of work left before someone else could run a factory around it.

That is a revealing business problem for a founder whose public identity is tied to sales and partnerships. Every new relationship adds an opportunity, and also another set of practical questions. Who will manufacture the product? How will the material be handled? What needs to change before the customer can repeat the process? A launch photograph rarely has room for all of this. The order book eventually does.

A booth with the machines missing

At Formnext in Frankfurt in 2024, Carbon displayed applications without putting printers on its stand. It was a memorable way for a printer company to make a point. DeSimone described an organization that spent about 80 percent of its effort on application development and employed more application engineers than sales representatives. The customer’s product was taking up the space ordinarily reserved for the equipment.

By then, he had joined Craig Carlson in Carbon’s Office of the CEO, a role he took on in 2022 after leading product and business development. The arrangement brought his work on customers and strategy into the company’s executive leadership. Carbon continues to identify him publicly as a member of that office and as a founder.

The business had used a subscription model when it introduced its first system in 2016. That meant the relationship with a customer continued beyond the arrival of a machine. In a business built around helping customers reach production, that continuing relationship is part of the proposition. There is little comfort in owning sophisticated equipment if nobody can get the intended product out of it.

Foam is a surprisingly large subject

In 2025, DeSimone described an organizing idea behind Carbon’s consumer applications: replacing foam. Shoes, bike saddles and helmet padding can look like unrelated markets until you consider what their interiors are being asked to do. Each involves controlling how a material responds to force in particular places.

A lattice gives designers another way to set those responses. Change the structure and a single printed part can have regions with different compression properties. DeSimone’s interest in cycling saddles followed precisely that logic: stiffness in one area, cushioning in another, with the design controlling the distinction.

His phrase for the campaign was “waging a war on foam.” It is a pleasingly domestic enemy for a technology company. More usefully, it gives the commercial team a problem to pursue across categories. The conversation can begin with an existing product and a specific job its cushioning needs to perform. That is a much more concrete sales meeting than a discussion about the future of everything.

“waging a war on foam”Philip DeSimone, March 2025

The arithmetic gets less forgiving

The manufacturing argument also has a financial side. In November 2025, Carbon announced a $60 million funding round involving existing investors including Sequoia Capital, Silver Lake, adidas, Baillie Gifford, Madrone and Northgate. The company said it was approaching cash-flow positive operations. It was reporting progress toward a financial milestone, alongside plans to expand capacity.

DeSimone has been direct about the pressure on his industry. In January 2026, he argued that a printer manufacturer needed differentiation through materials or software. He also expected further consolidation. His diagnosis made room for admiration of competitors, including Formlabs and Bambu Lab, while criticizing the instability that had damaged the sector’s reputation.

In a February 2026 article under his name, he returned to utilization: machines doing useful production work mattered more than machines merely being installed. That emphasis fits the career he had built. Partnerships are ultimately tested in use. A printer shipment can be counted once; a manufacturing relationship has to justify itself repeatedly.

A million places to sit

In October 2026, Carbon announced that its platform had produced more than one million cycling saddles. Eleven saddle brands were working with the platform, with more than 60 models in production. The company also described a manufacturing ecosystem of more than 40 production partners across 11 countries. These were company-reported figures, and they offered a concrete picture of the production network DeSimone had been discussing years earlier.

The saddle is a fitting object on which to pause. It is familiar, physically particular and seldom bought because its owner wants to celebrate a manufacturing process. Its value has to survive ordinary use. Carbon’s recent examples include individual lattice designs based on rider pressure data, turning personalization into an instruction for production.

DeSimone’s ambition extends to having people encounter a printed product every day. His career suggests how much patient work is packed inside that apparently simple wish: helping a founder get started, learning an industry’s shortcomings, recruiting brands, building manufacturing relationships, then doing it again for the next application. The future he is pursuing has to fit into everyday life. Sometimes that means beginning with a better place to sit.