3d-printing
(38)
Prototyping.io
Prototyping.io is a San Francisco startup (YC Spring 2026) building an AI-native manufacturing platform that turns CAD designs into finished mechanical parts in as little as one day. It automates the traditionally manual path from design to production - DFM analysis, sourcing, process planning, machine programming and setups - so hardware teams can iterate in days instead of weeks. The company serves customers from early-stage startups to multi-billion-dollar enterprises across robotics, AI infrastructure, energy, automotive and defense.
YC Corporation
YC Corporation is a Seoul-based digital transformation company that helps small and mid-sized Korean manufacturers go digital. As an official Autodesk partner, it supplies and consults on CAD/CAM/PLM software (Fusion 360, AutoCAD, Inventor, PowerMill), builds its own YC Smart Line MES, and sells the hardware - CNC routers, laser markers, 3D printers and IoT sensors - to run it. Founded in 2022 and bootstrapped, the company reached roughly 7 billion won in revenue by mid-2024 by focusing on shops that earlier smart-factory programs overlooked.
Cédric Kovacs-Johnson
Cédric Kovacs-Johnson is the founder and CEO of Flume Health, a New York-based software company that connects the fragmented healthcare data ecosystem so payers and employers can build and run health plans more efficiently. A chemical engineer by training, he first made his name as co-inventor of Spectrom, a full-color 3D printing technology that won the 2014 Collegiate Inventors Competition and was acquired by MakerBot. He founded Flume Health in 2017 and has raised more than $40 million in venture funding, including a $30 million Series A in 2022.
CairnSurgical, Inc.
CairnSurgical is a clinical-stage medical device company in Lebanon, New Hampshire, building patient-specific surgical guidance for breast cancer lumpectomy. Its Breast Cancer Locator (BCL) System pairs a 3D-printed, bra-like form molded to each patient's anatomy with an interactive 3D Visualizer derived from supine MRI, giving surgeons a precise blueprint of a tumor's size, shape, depth and edges. The goal is to cut the 20 to 25 percent re-excision rate in breast-conserving surgery toward zero. Spun out of Dartmouth College and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in 2015, the company reported 94 percent margin-negative resections in a European study and filed for FDA De Novo clearance in 2026.
Shapeways
Shapeways is an Eindhoven-based 3D printing and digital manufacturing company that lets individuals and businesses upload 3D files and receive custom parts made through additive manufacturing, CNC machining and injection molding. Founded in 2007 inside Royal Philips, it pioneered a public 3D printing service and marketplace, went public via SPAC in 2021, filed for bankruptcy in 2024, and was relaunched in December 2024 by its original founders and the profitable Eindhoven factory team with a renewed focus on B2B customers, sustainability and operational stability.
PIX Moving
PIX Moving is a city-robotics company that builds modular, drive-by-wire electric 'skateboard' chassis and autonomous 'mobile spaces' such as its RoboBus and RoboShop. Founded in 2014 and rooted in both Silicon Valley and China, PIX combines metal 3D printing, generative design, and self-driving software to turn vehicles into reconfigurable rooms on wheels - a shuttle that can become a cafe, gym, retail pop-up, or library. It sells its chassis and full vehicles to developers, cities, and mobility operators, and runs a Robot-as-a-Service model aimed at deploying fleets across dozens of countries.
Marleen Vogelaar
Marleen Vogelaar is a Dutch entrepreneur who co-founded Shapeways in 2007, helped build it into the world's largest 3D printing marketplace, left in 2014 to start the on-demand apparel company Ziel, and then returned to Shapeways as CEO in December 2024 after the company went bankrupt - buying back the brand and rebuilding it around a leaner, B2B, profit-first model. A former competitive heptathlete and industrial engineer, she is known for pairing operational discipline with an insistence that a company's mission should not be hostage to its investors, an idea she put into practice by converting Ziel to steward-ownership.
Factorem
Factorem is an AI-driven on-demand manufacturing platform based in Singapore. Founded in 2020 by Alexandra Zhang and Hardik Dobariya, it lets engineering and hardware teams upload a CAD file, get an instant quote, and order custom parts - CNC machining, 3D printing, sheet metal fabrication, injection molding and surface treatment - from a vetted network of Southeast Asian factories, with no minimum order quantity. The platform uses AI to scan designs, match them to the best-suited manufacturer, and manage end-to-end fulfilment, compressing prototyping timelines from months to days.
MacLean-Fogg
MacLean-Fogg is a fourth-generation, family-owned American manufacturer founded in 1925 that grew from a single railroad lock nut into a global maker of fasteners, engineered components, plastics, and additive-manufacturing tooling. Headquartered in Mundelein, Illinois, the roughly $1.2 billion-a-year enterprise supplies the automotive, heavy-truck, electric utility, telecom, and industrial markets from dozens of plants across North America, Europe, and Asia. In 2025 it marked its 100th anniversary still owned and led by the MacLean family.
Verustruct
Verustruct is a New Haven-based construction-technology company building a gantry-less 3D printing system to make affordable, sustainable housing at scale. Founded by former SpaceX engineer Nick Callegari, its patent-pending translational slipform printer extrudes load-bearing walls with embedded mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems, then scales itself up layer by layer, sidestepping the bulky gantry frames that cap the size of most additive-construction projects. Organized as a public benefit corporation, Verustruct aims to cut home construction cost by roughly half and emissions by around 40 percent.
Z-Polymers
Z-Polymers is a Lowell, Massachusetts materials science company that emerged from the UMass Lowell Innovation Hub to build Tullomer, a PFAS-free liquid crystal super-polymer spun into ultra-fine fibers and 3D-printing filament. Founded in 2021 by materials scientist Dr. Michael Zimmerman, the company claims strength up to four times that of PEEK - and up to six times stronger than steel at a sixth of the weight - while printing on desktop machines without annealing. Its materials target aerospace, defense, medical devices, energy, and functional fabrics, and in 2026 it secured a strategic seed investment and joint development agreement with Japan's Kureha Corporation.
Caralynn Nowinski Collens
Caralynn Nowinski Collens is a physician-turned-entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Dimension Bio (formerly Dimension Inx), a Chicago biotechnology company building regenerative therapeutics that give the body a blueprint to heal itself. Its BioNidum platform fuses materials science, 3D-printing, and digital manufacturing to turn cells into implantable, tissue-like therapies. Before biotech, she spent eight years co-founding and running UI LABS, the innovation collaborative that launched MxD, the U.S. national hub for digital manufacturing. She trained as an M.D./MBA at the University of Illinois at Chicago and has been recognized on Crain's Forty Under Forty, Tech 50, and Notable Women in STEM lists.
Gregory Mark
Gregory Mark is a three-time founder and MIT-trained aerospace engineer who is rebuilding how physical things get made. After inventing continuous carbon fiber 3D printing and taking Markforged from a garage idea to a $2.1B public company, he launched Backflip AI in 2024, a generative AI tool that turns text, sketches, and scans into 3D-printable, manufacturable models. Backflip raised a $30M Series A co-led by NEA and Andreessen Horowitz, with angels including Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott and 'Attention Is All You Need' co-author Ashish Vaswani.
James Hedrick
James Hedrick is the co-founder and CEO of Azul 3D, a Skokie, Illinois deep-tech company commercializing HARP (High Area Rapid Printing), a resin 3D-printing technology he helped invent during his PhD at Northwestern University in Chad Mirkin's lab. HARP uses a flowing, non-stick liquid interface to carry away heat, letting large parts print continuously up to 100 times faster than layer-by-layer machines - fast enough and strong enough to challenge injection molding. Hedrick started his first company at 16 to pay his way through MIT, where he was an NCAA athlete, and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Manufacturing & Industry list in 2020.
Jifei Ou
Jifei Ou is the founder and CEO of OPT Industries, a Medford, Massachusetts company that turned a decade of MIT Media Lab research into a new kind of factory. After nearly seven years spent learning to 3D-print fur, hair, and micro-textures no mold could produce, Ou built RAMP, described as the world's first roll-to-roll 3D printing system, which prints intricate microstructures by the mile. Rather than sell machines, OPT sells the products it makes on them - false eyelashes, beauty applicators, and diagnostic swabs that outperformed the gold standard during COVID. Ou raised $15M in Series A funding and is betting that reconnecting design and production can bring precision manufacturing back onshore.
LuxCreo
LuxCreo is a digital manufacturing company turning dental clinics and labs into same-day production floors. Its patented LEAP (Light Enabled Additive Production) printers, ActiveMemory polymers, and LuxFlow software combine to deliver FDA-cleared, directly 3D-printed clear aligners, night guards, dentures and crowns - cutting weeks of traditional workflow down to hours.
Alexandra Zhang
Alexandra Zhang is the co-founder and CEO of Factorem, an AI-native, on-demand manufacturing platform born in Singapore that connects hardware and photonics teams with a vetted network of factories across Southeast Asia. After hitting sourcing walls as an engineer building EV transmissions in Toronto, she built the platform she wished she'd had: instant quotes, no minimum order quantities, and lead times cut from months to days. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, she relocated from Singapore to Colorado to open the U.S. market, which now drives nearly half of company sales.
Mike Zimmerman
Mike Zimmerman is the founder and CEO of Z-Polymers, the Lowell, Massachusetts company behind Tullomer, a melt-spun super polymer marketed as stronger than PEEK and stainless steel yet light enough to print on a desktop 3D machine. A career materials scientist with a PhD in mechanical engineering, he spent nearly 15 years at Bell Labs and Saint-Gobain before founding a string of deep-tech ventures including Quantum Leap Packaging and the solid-state battery company Ionic Materials. He has also taught materials science at Tufts University for more than three decades.
Nicholas Callegari
Nicholas Callegari is the founder, chief engineer, and CEO of Verustruct, a New Haven climate-tech startup building gantry-less 3D printing robots that print entire load-bearing walls - plumbing, wiring, and insulation included. A former SpaceX structures engineer who helped design the Polaris Dawn spacewalk hardware on the Dragon spacecraft, he traded orbit for the housing crisis, betting that the same first-principles engineering used for spacecraft can cut home construction costs in half. He is a 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in Manufacturing & Industry and a Yale School of Management MBA.
Impossible Objects, Inc.
Impossible Objects is a Northbrook, Illinois manufacturer of industrial 3D printers built around its proprietary CBAM (Composite-Based Additive Manufacturing) process. Instead of melting plastic filament, CBAM stacks long-fiber sheets of carbon fiber or fiberglass, inkjet-prints each layer with a fluid, bonds them with high-performance polymer powders like PEEK and nylon, then compresses and heats the stack into a solid composite part. The result is parts the company says are stronger, more dimensionally accurate, and printed up to 15x faster than competing methods - aimed at aerospace, defense, automotive, and electronics customers that need composite parts at production volume.
Brad Kreger
Brad Kreger is a medical device and manufacturing executive who became CEO of Baltimore-based CoapTech in November 2025, taking over from co-founder Howard Carolan. He brings nearly three decades of operations experience, most recently turning around metal 3D-printing company Velo3D as its CEO, with earlier senior roles at Fluidigm/Standard BioTools, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Affymetrix. At CoapTech he leads commercialization of the percutaneous ultrasound gastrostomy (PUG) system, an ultrasound-guided method of placing feeding tubes at the bedside that has been used in more than 1,000 patients.
Physna
Physna is a geometric deep-learning company that does for 3D models and physical objects what Google did for text: it lets machines actually understand shape. Its proprietary technology codifies the geometry of any 3D model into searchable, comparable data, powering both an enterprise platform used by Fortune 500 manufacturers and government agencies, and Thangs, a free public 3D search engine and creator community that has grown to tens of millions of monthly users. Founded in 2015 in Ohio and backed by Sequoia, Tiger Global, GV and Drive Capital with more than $86M raised, Physna turns the physical world into something a computer can search, match and protect.
Relativity Space
Relativity Space is an American aerospace company building rockets in a radically different way - by 3D printing the bulk of each vehicle with its proprietary Stargate metal printers and autonomous robotics. Founded in 2015, it became the first company to launch a largely 3D-printed rocket (Terran 1) in 2023, and is now focused on Terran R, a medium-to-heavy-lift, fully reusable launch vehicle aimed at the commercial and government markets. Under CEO Eric Schmidt, who took the helm in 2025, the company is also exploring orbital infrastructure for AI and high-performance computing.
John Kawola
John Kawola is a 3D printing industry veteran who has spent nearly three decades turning niche additive-manufacturing technologies into real businesses. He led Z Corporation through the dawn of full-color 3D printing, ran a farm-and-warehouse robotics company, built Ultimaker's North American footprint, and then took the helm of Boston Micro Fabrication (BMF), the company making 3D printers that resolve features down to two microns - smaller than a human hair. In 2025 he handed off the CEO role at BMF to become a strategic advisor.
Lukas Czinger
Lukas Czinger is the co-founder and CEO of Divergent Technologies, a Torrance-based company that built an end-to-end digital manufacturing platform fusing AI-driven generative design, metal 3D printing, and automated robotic assembly. He is also co-founder of Czinger Vehicles, whose 3D-printed 21C hypercar has shattered production-car lap records at tracks like Laguna Seca. A Yale electrical engineering graduate and former investment banker, he joined his father Kevin's startup at the most junior rung and climbed to run the company, holding close to 60 personal patents while pushing the platform from supercars into aerospace and defense.
Azul 3D, Inc.
Azul 3D is a Skokie, Illinois deep-tech manufacturer that builds large-format, high-speed industrial 3D printers powered by its proprietary High Area Rapid Printing (HARP) technology. Spun out of Northwestern University in 2016, the company uses a flowing layer of non-stick fluorinated oil to carry away heat during continuous stereolithographic printing, which lets its machines produce human-sized polymer parts in hours rather than days. Its flagship LAKE printer targets manufacturers who want to make finished goods at scale instead of one-off prototypes.
Backflip AI
Backflip AI is a San Francisco-based generative AI company building 3D design tools for the physical world. Founded by the Markforged co-founders Greg Mark and David Benhaim, it turns text prompts, sketches and photos into editable 3D meshes (Idea to Mesh) and converts 3D scan data into fully parametric CAD models in one click (Scan-to-CAD / Mesh-to-CAD), with native Onshape and SOLIDWORKS integration. The company raised a $30M Series A co-led by NEA and Andreessen Horowitz and trained its model on a synthetic dataset of over 100 million 3D geometries.
OPT Industries
OPT Industries is an MIT-spun materials foundry in Medford, Massachusetts that built the world's first roll-to-roll 3D printing platform, RAMP. By pairing computational design software with continuous additive manufacturing, OPT prints micron-precise materials at unlimited length and high volume - producing everything from the InstaSwab COVID-19 nasal swab to flockless cosmetic applicators and false eyelashes. The pitch is simple: one process, endless possibilities.
Paul Powers
Paul Powers is the co-founder and CEO of Physna, the Ohio startup teaching computers to understand the physical world by turning 3D geometry into searchable 'Physical DNA.' A homeschooled kid who entered Harvard at 16 and later passed the German bar exam in a foreign language, he turned an intellectual-property obsession into a geometric-search company backed by Sequoia, Tiger Global, and Drive Capital. Physna also runs Thangs, a community platform of tens of millions of 3D models that he describes as the GitHub for hardware. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Powers is one of the most prominent founders building deep-tech outside Silicon Valley.
Steve Hoover
Steve Hoover is the CEO of Impossible Objects, the Northbrook, Illinois company commercializing CBAM (composite-based additive manufacturing), a from-the-ground-up 3D printing process that bonds carbon fiber and other composites into parts that are stronger, lighter and more heat-tolerant than conventional prints. A mechanical engineer with a Carnegie Mellon doctorate, he spent roughly two decades at Xerox, rising to corporate CTO and running PARC as CEO, before a stint leading RIT's Global Cybersecurity Institute and co-founding the art-recognition startup Artify.ai. He took the Impossible Objects helm in March 2023 to push composite 3D printing from prototypes into high-volume manufacturing.