Walking onto Carbon’s stand at this year’s Formnext feels like browsing a sporting goods store. It’s a 3D printing event, but there are no 3D printers to be seen, and that’s kind of the point of the Silicon Valley company’s presence here in Frankfurt – it’s all about applications.
“We just do it differently,” Phil DeSimone, Office of the CEO at Carbon tells me. “We’re trying to work with customers to help them get better products to market faster. We don't sell them machines.”
It’s both a literal and figurative statement from a CEO within an industry that has often been criticised for selling ‘boxes’ instead of solutions to real end-use manufacturing challenges. While that’s largely something additive manufacturing machine makers have gotten better at over the years, when Carbon introduced its first system back in 2016, it was unique in doing so with a subscription model that offered its technology via a connected network that aimed to take out the initial barrier to entry of high AM equipment costs. Today, DeSimone says the company identifies itself as more of a “solutions provider,” working directly with customers to ensure the technology lives up to its promise.
“The apps drive it,” DeSimone says, adding that around 80% of the Carbon’s job is about application development, with more application engineers than sales representatives on staff. “I know that as soon as I get them hooked, I've got a customer for life.”
Next March will mark ten years since Carbon founder Joe DeSimone stood on stage at TED and talked about a new additive manufacturing process inspired by Terminator 2, while demonstrating live its ability to print a complex object in under ten minutes. Then, it was all about speed, build times pitched between 25 and 100 times faster than the technologies on the market at the time, and the race for ‘the fastest 3D printer ever’ commenced. A year later, at the 2016 Additive Manufacturing Users Group Conference, the industry got its first real look at Carbon’s technology, known as CLIP, in the form of the M1 3D printer, and it quickly became clear this was as much a story about materials development as it was hardware. Then, in 2017 adidas unveiled its Futurecraft 4D shoe and with it, signature latticed midsoles that would be mass produced using Carbon’s technology, perhaps one of the most recognisable applications of 3D printing of the last decade.
“I would argue that was the single biggest moment in the history of 3D printing,” DeSimone said. “Because it was the first time ever that a large company was saying ‘this is good enough to make and put on a shelf.’ All of this wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for that. Because they knocked down the supply chain. They made it possible. And everyone else rode the coattails of that.”
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Carbon
adidas 4DFWD running shoe
Carbon’s technology appears to have found a good home in consumer and sports equipment with brands like Jack Wolfskin and Riddell amongst its customers. Just this year, its materials, Design Engine and Digital Light Synthesis process have been put to work by companies like Fizik, which has developed a first-of-its-kind custom 3D printed bike saddle, and Puma, which used the technology to bring A$AP Rocky's monstrous, spiky red Puma Mostro to life. “The largest fashion brands in the world are asking me how to launch shoes,” DeSimone said, but even outside of such consumer-facing sectors, Carbon has secured users in industries like automotive, including Ford, Lamborghini and Lotus, the latter of which worked with the company to develop a latticed headrest design for its Theory 1 concept car, and in healthcare where dental manufacturer Keystone Industries recently marked a milestone of 1 million dental parts printed.
“What we believe is that the future is going to be more personal,” DeSimone said. “Things are going to be designed and made with intent.”
More personal, but also just more of them. DeSimone says he wants to see 3D printing get to a point where we touch a product made with the technology every day of our lives. But, he admits, it will take work to make that happen, work that he believes hasn’t been prioritised in the AM space as much as it perhaps should.
“The machine doesn't matter. The materials don't matter. It's about helping people figure out how to use it," DeSimone said. "I think that's the biggest missing part in this industry.”
Yet, materials developments do matter, and have become an enabling force – from rigid to elastomeric, to dental-certified – in widening the gamut of applications possible today. At Formnext, for example, Carbon announced its EPU Pro materials platform, which is said to deliver the benefits of its proprietary dual-cure resins in a single container while improving usability for production. DeSimone hands me a collection of samples, each ranging in finish and rigidity, demonstrating the flexibility of the platform, which can also incorporate foaming agents to introduce haptics, create a suede-like touch and enable greater design freedoms for curvatures and delicate features.
DeSimone explained of the single-part container, “Dual cure is amazing, but one of the challenges is it's a two-part system. So you're mixing two ingredients together into the bowl and then you do the print. That resin has a pot life so you have about 8 to 12 hours to print your part or a series of parts, and then you need to wash it out and start over again. So you have to think about that when you're going through the process, and it adds complexity. We figured out how to get the same mechanical properties that we have in a dual cure system, but in a one-part container. It allows us a much wider range of capabilities. Essentially, out of the same [material] platform you get multiple different 'feels'."
Materials are just one of the areas DeSimone is referring to when he talks about figuring out AM’s “tough, dirty and gritty” work, alongside post-processing: essentially, the expensive, "thankless" R&D stuff that customers don’t really want to be spending their time doing. They just need the technology to work.
“We continue to invest in things that people don't want to invest in," DeSimone said. "It's a tough business. It's not for the faint of heart. But when you see what we go through to get that shoe to production, and somebody says they're going to do the same thing? Good luck. You're welcome to, because it's not easy.”
Fizik
Fizik customised bike saddle
DeSimone took on his role at the Office of the CEO alongside Craig Carlson in 2022. His appointment came at a time when the AM industry was awash with investments and companies going public via Special Purpose Acquisition Companies, rather than traditional IPOs, and in some cases, going out of business shortly after. For Carbon, a company which received a billion-dollar valuation early on (one of only three 3D printing companies at the time to do so), it seemed like only a matter of time before the company would make its play for the stock market.
“We were planning on going public,” DeSimone said, “but the proper route.”
DeSimone predicts another challenging 12 months for the industry. The venture money isn't as free flowing as it once was, and the series of failed SPACs has left a bitter taste, but DeSimone believes Carbon can do it in a way that will help to change the overall view of the industry, and rise everybody up.
“We want to get the company public,” DeSimone confirmed. “That's what we want to do. Because we want to show the industry that there's another way to do this.”
DeSimone is optimistic that over the next two years the industry will come out of the other side. AM has weathered storms before. The technology has rode both hype and disillusionment curves and has found itself “on the cusp” as promises of revolutions have been slower to materialise, if at all, but balanced out by applications that have combatted supply chain disruptions and improved lives. New players have come and gone in the decade Carbon has been around, many swallowed up by the flurry of M&A activity that has happened in the last five years (Carbon did get in on the action itself with the acquisition of generative design company ParaMatters in 2022), but DeSimone is resolute, “If we got scared every time a new company came along, we would have stopped in 2013.” He believes AM technology is already good enough as it is today to fulfil its promise, and has seen first-hand hundreds of printers operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That, he said, was his first goal. The next is simply more.
“It's all about more products and we want to have everyone touch a 3D printed product every day," he said. "That is our goal, that our lives are made better every day by a 3D printed product. It's going to take a lot of work to get there, but we're more optimistic than ever that we're getting closer and closer and closer to it.”
