additive-manufacturing
(17)
Jason Ballard
Jason Ballard is the co-founder and CEO of ICON, an Austin-based construction technology company that uses large-scale 3D printing, robotics, and advanced materials to build homes faster and more affordably. A biology graduate and former sustainable-building entrepreneur, Ballard printed the first permitted 3D-printed home in the United States in 2018 and has since pushed ICON toward delivering entire communities of printed homes while developing an off-world construction system for NASA to build on the Moon and Mars.
Maria Intscher-Owrang
Maria Intscher-Owrang is the co-founder and CEO of Simplifyber, a Raleigh-area materials startup that molds cellulose-based liquid directly into finished textile and composite parts, eliminating spinning, weaving, cutting and sewing. After more than two decades designing for Vera Wang, Calvin Klein, Dirk Bikkembergs and Alexander McQueen, she left luxury fashion to rebuild manufacturing from the fiber up, landing partnerships with GANNI and Kia and a $12M Series A led by Suzano Ventures.
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.
Saurabh Ullal
Saurabh Ullal is the CEO of 6K, an advanced materials company in North Andover, Massachusetts that uses a microwave-plasma process called UniMelt to make battery cathode powders and metal powders for additive manufacturing. A chemical engineer by training with a PhD from UC Santa Barbara, he joined 6K as COO and stepped into the CEO role in September 2024 alongside an $82M Series E close, tasked with scaling a technology invented at MIT into industrial tonnage.
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.
Naweed Tahmas
Naweed Tahmas is the founder and CEO of Aeon (Aeon Industrial), an Austin-area defense startup building Zeus, a software-defined, 3D-printed modular guided missile priced around $50,000 - a fraction of legacy tactical munitions. Before defense, he was a Special Assistant to the President and Associate Director in the Trump White House, coordinating policy and personnel across 15 federal agencies. Years earlier he was the combative vice president of the Berkeley College Republicans at the height of the 2017 campus free-speech battles, a fight he carried all the way to a DOJ-backed lawsuit. He has since traded the campus quad for a Cedar Park factory floor, where Aeon aims to turn out more than 10,000 missiles a year.
Duncan MacLean
Duncan MacLean is the President and CEO of MacLean-Fogg, the Mundelein, Illinois manufacturing company his great-grandfather founded in 1925. A Dartmouth-trained engineer who started in quality control as a teenager, he is the fourth generation of his family to run the roughly $1 billion enterprise. He joined as a manufacturing engineer in 1996, spent 4.5 years in Germany, rebuilt the components business after the 2008 recession, and now leads global operations across fasteners, power systems, plastics, and 3D-printed tooling as the company crosses its 100-year mark.
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.
James DeMuth
James DeMuth is the co-founder and CEO of Seurat Technologies, a Wilmington, Massachusetts metal additive manufacturing company chasing a single audacious goal: printing metal parts fast and cheap enough to compete with mass production, then planting factories next to the customers who need them. He co-invented Seurat's Area Printing technology while working on laser fusion research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, holds a hand in roughly 145 patents, and has raised more than $181 million to reshore manufacturing and cut carbon out of how metal gets made.
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.
Mark Sommer
Mark Sommer is the founder and CEO of Gamma Alloys, a Santa Clarita-based materials company that 'decorates' metal powders with ceramic nanoparticles to make aluminum strong enough to 3D print into aerospace and automotive parts. He simultaneously leads Del West Engineering, the Formula 1 world's go-to maker of titanium valves and lightweight valvetrain components. Backed by Boeing HorizonX, his bet is that of the roughly 5,500 industrial alloys in use, only a few dozen work with 3D printers today, and Gamma's nano-ceramic process can unlock the rest.
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.
Mike Yang
Mike Yang is the co-founder and CEO of LuxCreo, the company behind the world's first FDA Class II 510(k)-cleared direct-print clear aligner. A Harvard PhD and Wharton MBA, Yang spent a decade at Bloom Energy raising over $1B in green technology before pivoting to reinvent dentistry with light-based additive manufacturing. Under his leadership LuxCreo secured backing from Kleiner Perkins, achieved FDA clearance in 2022, launched in Europe in 2025, and is pushing same-day, in-clinic aligner production into mainstream dentistry.
Hardik Kabaria
Hardik Kabaria is Co-Founder and CEO of Vinci4D.ai (now getvinci.ai), a Palo Alto-based AI company building a physics foundation model that makes hardware simulation 1000x faster than traditional finite element analysis. A Stanford PhD in Mechanics and Computation, he spent eight years at Carbon - the 3D printing unicorn - rising from software engineer to CXO before founding Vinci in 2023. His company emerged from stealth in December 2025 with $46M raised from Xora Innovation, Khosla Ventures, and Eclipse, already deployed with three leading semiconductor manufacturers and validated by over half the world's top 20 chip companies.