Four years ago, two 3D printing start-ups - a Stereolithography (SLA) vendor from Rome, Italy and a Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) system provider from Krakow - made a gutsy decision to up sticks, move their respective businesses across the Atlantic Ocean and settle in Ventura, California under the stewardship of a former 3D Systems CEO.
Avi Reichental’s new venture, XponentialWorks, was just getting started. It was scouting young and innovative companies, investing in some abroad and persuading others that he would become co-founder of to base themselves in California. The idea was that the likes of Nexa3D and NXT Factory could ‘collide’ in the same facility space; benefit from the same guidance, marketing and domain expertise in AI and robotics; and use the same IP firm.
That idea grew. As both begun laying the foundations for commercialisation of their respective SLA and SLS technologies, they agreed to use their existing space as the facility to build both Nexa’s NXE400 and NXT Factory’s Quantum Laser Sintering (QLS) 350 system, utilising much of the same supply chain. By the end of 2019, Reichental sat as the CEO of Nexa3D and discussions were underway about how the two companies might take the next step.
“As our campus in Ventura expanded,” Reichental recalls, “we, in parallel, built two very complementary products and, at a certain time towards the end of 2019, we began to realise that we were finding ourselves repeating for NXT Factory a lot of the steps that we’ve taken maybe six or nine months prior with Nexa3D, which is a little bit further ahead in its evolution. Namely, how do we set-up the go-to market? How do we go and create the reseller arrangements? How do we sell and market the product? How do we provide the pre- and post-sale, and also ongoing customer success operations?”
Those questions would eventually be answered, but not before COVID-19 swept across the two companies’ old home of Europe and their current one of the United States. At once, the Nexa3D and NXT Factory teams were talking, about on acquiring the other, and acting, in response to the pandemic. Reichental has many ways of describing the pandemic. An ‘awakening’ and a ‘catalyst’, ‘hard’ but ‘productive’. It has been a busy period for the company, maintaining momentum with the sale of 70 NXE400 platforms, the signing of distribution agreements, the release of around half a dozen new materials, and in the run-up to Formnext Connect, the release of the xCure post-processing system.
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Nexa xCure
xCure station beside the NXE400 SLA platform.
xCure is a dual cure system optimised for the NXE400 platform but able to support other stereolithography machines on the market. It was born out of necessity as the company printed thousands of components for face shields and other personal protective equipment during the pandemic. Designed to support companies scale up to production with their stereolithography machine, it supports both UV and thermal curing, boasts a number of resin-specific pre-sets that help to ensure consistency, and can process parts at volumes of 16 litres.
“Increasingly, we are coming to grips with the reality that when you print at the speeds we are printing, we’re just kicking the can forward in terms of the next bottleneck, and the bottleneck is clearly then in the washing and curing,” Reichental says. “In polymer 3D printing, one of the fragile components is the ability to gain repeatability, consistency and acceptable yields when you’re printing high volumes, that assure print to print, machine to machine, you get the same mechanical performance. To us, this is mission critical in the sense that, what’s the point of printing as fast as we can - up to eight litres per hour on the build platform - if we can’t assure consistency or if your scrap rate is high?”
While the xCure system is set to help users scale to larger volumes and maintain consistency as they do, Nexa has also been working to expand the application envelope of its stereolithography system with the launch of new materials. As Formnext approached, Nexa unveiled its xCast material, a resin that has been tailored specifically for use in the printing of precision investment casting patterns that will be used to produce complex metal parts, and one that promises 20 times the productivity of traditional alternatives, as well as cleaner burnout for metals like titanium and aluminium.
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Part printed on the NXE400 in xCast material.
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Part printed on the NXE400 in xPRO410 material.
Prior to that, the company unveiled a third material developed with Henkel – after a xMed412 medical-grade polypropylene-like product in June and an ABS resin in April – in the form of a general-purpose prototyping grade. This material, xPRO410, is to be supplied with every future NXE400 sale and is being offered to help users produce multiple daily design iterations. The alliance with Henkel and open nature of Nexa’s approach is in complete contrast to the other 3D printing outfit Reichental served as CEO. At 3D Systems, the company has largely backed its own in-house expertise to provide customers with hardware, software and materials, but Reichental has sought to exact a different way of doing things.
“Henkel has an incredible bench of formulating and blending and a new class of photoplastics that companies like Nexa are not likely to be able to develop anytime soon,” Reichental explains. “One of the lessons I learned from many years in the industry is that while having closed, integrated systems could assure quality and preserve profits, in reality, it also arrests development of the market, it holds back the realisation of the full capabilities of these technologies.
“With Nexa, we decided that we’re going to turn this business model on its head, open the systems, invite every formulator and supplier to come and develop with us. Already, we see that these collaborations are opening completely new applications and allowing us to introduce new materials to the market in a very dynamic way, almost at a frequency of a material every five or six weeks.”
Following in the NXE400's footsteps, the QLS 350 is coming to market with much of the same ideas. Just as the xPRO410 material will with the SLA platform, a high temperature PBT material will be part of the QLS 350 starter kit. This powder bed fusion system is said to boast similar fast-printing capabilities as Nexa’s SLA offering and capable of ‘operating at a higher temperature range than your everyday Selective Laser Sintering machine’, opening up the variety of materials able to be processed.
To bring said materials to market, Nexa is leaning on the expertise of DSM and Evonik. The PBT has been developed by DSM and is included as a freebie for every machine purchase to ‘expose SLS users to the fact you can use more than just PA 11 and PA 12.’ Yet, a PA 12 has been developed in partnership with Evonik, while a third material ‘in the PP area’ is expected to be available before the QLS system starts being shipped early next year.
Ten out of ten times, our customers are a hell of a lot smarter than us.
As that landmark drew closer through 2020, the conversations that were had at the end of last year arose again. Already sharing a working space, promising similar benefits and collaborating with materials suppliers, NXT Factory was now starting to consider distribution, marketing and all the things required to ‘prove, nail and scale’ its technology.
“The obvious question,” Reichental explains, “was why replicate here? We have two companies that have similar DNA, they sit in the same campus, they are completely complementary in terms of addressable market, – in fact, they kind of double the addressable market – they have an almost identical value proposition which is about 20x sync productivity, scaling it and taking additive to the production floor, why not just come together?
“Because together, we can create a much more powerful and much more compelling value proposition that is not saddled by legacy issues or older technology and really go to the market with a unified front. It wasn’t a difficult or a long discussion. COVID-19 gave us the last push of, ‘hey, why are we screwing around here? Let’s make this happen.’ Maybe, in some ways, it was preordained. We just didn’t see it.”
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Nexa NXT Factory QLS 350
Nexa3D QLS 350 platform.
As the acquisition was going through, NXT Factory was in discussions with a few dozen qualified customers, many of which operate in the automotive space, to better understand their wants and needs ahead of the commercial release of the QLS 350. Much of the feedback would make any tech provider blush. The architecture, the capabilities, the speed, the elevated process temperatures, the ease of carrying out maintenance, all of these characteristics came in for praise. But there was also a yearning for the machine to be easily integrated into factory automation control systems so they could exploit data acquisition and analysis, while implementing the most suitable Manufacturing Execution System alongside it.
By September, Nexa was ready to announce Siemens had come on board to standardise the QLS portfolio to its advanced factory automation and edge computing technologies. They have since been working side by side to transition the QLS from its ‘current state to the future state.’
“If you really want to be relevant, you have to find the right collaborators because ten out of ten times, our customers are a hell of a lot smarter than us. They know exactly what they want,” Reichental says. “When we looked at what Siemens has to offer, both in terms of control systems, edge computing, the incredible capabilities they have around digital twin software capabilities and simulation, it became a no brainer.”
Read more: Nexa3D and CASTOR launch automated 3D printing decision support platform
In the new year, Nexa will start delivering this system through an ‘advanced beta’, after alpha testing was carried out in-house, to many of the customers whose thoughts were surveyed. The automation capabilities underpin a 350 x 350 x 400 mm build volume, print speed of up to 8000 ccm per hour, four 100W CO2 lasers, a power handling and refreshing station and an ability to print materials like PA6 at temperatures up to 240°C. It is also said to be capable of producing 150k polymer parts annually, per Nexa3D, and consume up to 20 tonnes of material when operating 24/7 all year round.
As it sits beside the NXE400 system, Nexa is confident it can now penetrate several industries with its multiple 3D printing processes and broad range of polymer materials. While automotive players have had a keen interest in the QLS platform since it was first exhibited at AM trade shows and Henkel has developed medical-grade resin for the NXE machine, Nexa sees plenty of scope for both machines to be of use across industry.
“It puts us in a fortunate position because we don’t have to dictate to a customer, ‘you can only have this,’ but we say to them, ‘listen, here are the pros and cons of using one or the other. Let’s have a constructive conversation and decide together.’ At the end of the day, we want to be consultative,” Reichental says.
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The full Nexa3D hardware line-up.
And this is how the ball got rolling on the acquisition of NXT Factory by Nexa3D. Back at RAPID + TCT in 2019, Reichental told TCT how both companies were soon to ‘fly the nest’ and exhibit on their own, out of the XponentialWorks umbrella, with that ecosystem turning its attention to the next advanced manufacturing start-ups. The outbreak of COVID-19 might have thrown a spanner in the works, and the company considers itself fortunate that it was able to sell 3D printing hardware throughout this year while many others struggled to do so, but Reichental is now ‘enormously optimistic’ about the future of additive manufacturing.
He has been working on a hunch that the world is not going back to old practices and behaviours. Amidst the pandemic, contact has been with customers via Zoom calls as opposed to factory visits, and Reichental sees some parallels in the future of 3D printing. Technologies that were already ‘locked and loaded’ pre-COVID are set now to accelerate. The acquisition was made with that in mind.
“COVID was an awakening and a catalyst,” Reichental assesses. “Part of our preparation was how do we strengthen Nexa during this period and use it to our advantage. [We were] accelerating partnerships and product developments and new product launches, but the other part was, we have a unique opportunity here, at the right stage for both companies, to basically double our addressable market and go out with a more complete portfolio that can benefit enormously from the secular tailwinds that will emerge out of COVID.
“The ability for a new generation of company like Nexa to take all these steps during COVID and execute on our product development roadmap, our commercial roadmap and benefit from an acquisition like this to strengthen our capabilities is exciting for us.”
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