“Oh, it’s being recorded,” states VELO3D CEO Benny Buller with a chuckle, before settling into his seat.
It’s the type of comment that might typically proceed an interview where lips remain sealed, and punches are pulled. A routine conversation, uneventful and perhaps even uninteresting. Not the case.
You’d be forgiven for thinking the same of VELO3D’s story since it emerged from stealth in 2018. From afar, the VELO3D trajectory looks like a steep ascent – from a start-up with a bright idea to a publicly listed company inside three years – with no bumps in the road. But that wasn’t the case either.
“We built something that was considered impossible,” Buller says, referencing the company’s ‘supportless’ metal 3D printing capabilities. “So, when we build that, we left a lot of open patches, it wasn’t complete and there were a lot of problems. But we never had the opportunity to fix that, the blanket was always way too small and had a lot of holes in it as we stretched.”
The public listing it first announced back in March via special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) JAWS Spitfire is the solution to this worn and torn blanket. VELO3D had planned to go public from the outset, though the opportunity came about around 18 months earlier than anticipated. It will, Buller says, allow VELO to serve its customers better, as well as allow it to ‘think very strategically about what the bottlenecks are for our growth.’ Whatever those investments are, Buller assures us they are being made.
“This is a luxury we just didn’t have. We were basically living in survival mode. It was like, ‘let’s make sure that we deliver to the customers what we tell them we will, and this will give us the next line of life and then we’ll stumble upon the next problem, and we’ll solve that.’ This is the first time that we can actually get ahead of the problems.”
VELO3D launched its metal 3D printing technology, which boasts the ability to print complex metal components at acute angles with minimal supports required, back in 2018. With a 315 x 400 mm build volume, two 1KW lasers and a closed-loop melt pool control, VELO3D was targeting high volume production opportunities. The company then introduced the next-generation Sapphire system in April 2020, a retrofitted Sapphire with a one-metre-tall build volume designed specifically for the oil and gas space, and the Sapphire XC in October 2020, to allow customers to scale their applications to greater volumes with ‘three times better economics’ than the standard platform.
We had reliability problems and we only had the chance to work on the most urgent reliability problems.
Though the company, then, has been building out its portfolio to cater for a range of application and volume requirements. But it wouldn’t work with just anyone.
“Every opportunity we get into, the first question that our salespeople have to answer is WTFV? Why the (we’ll leave this word to your imagination) VELO? If there is no big value proposition that we bring to this customer in a unique way, we don’t get into this opportunity,” Buller says. “The second thing that we ask our people is, is there a big impact here? Is there a big manufacturing opportunity? A big repeat business? A big strategic impact on the customer? If no, we’re not going to do that.”
It is with this attitude that VELO3D has built up its operations in the United States. Assessing that some customers have an interest and the capacity to bring metal additive manufacturing in-house – and some don’t – VELO3D employs a team of direct salespeople to sell its Sapphire hardware portfolio and a team of technical salespeople who cater for customers that want printed parts without investing in a printer. In these instances, the technical salespeople provide consultancy at no extra charge to the customer, helping them develop the product before passing it on to a contract manufacturing partner to produce the parts.
“We have this full package of direct sales, technical sales, application support for existing customers, and field service, as a full solution that we provide to our customers,” Buller explains. “And we do not nickel and dime it, meaning we give our customers whatever they need to be successful. This is the model we built in the United States, so that’s what we are trying to do in Europe now.”
VELO3D/ Twitter
The VELO3D team at Formnext.
In Europe, VELO3D has recently announced the opening of a technical centre in Augsburg, Germany, while also appointing Dr Jose Greses as Managing Director and Xavier Fruh as Sales Director to cover Germany, Spain and France between them. The 1,200 square feet European Technology Centre will be used to assemble and demonstrate Sapphire systems and enhance the services the company provides to customers in Europe’s largest markets.
It’s an expansion VELO3D had intended to make earlier.
“We needed the resources to do that. Last year, we really wanted to do that, but we didn’t have the resources. Our public offering is what allows us to do this.”
By establishing a team of Europe-based executives - which also includes Jon Porter, who is operating from the UK as European Business Development Director - and opening a technical centre, VELO3D has patched up a significant hole in its blanket. It hasn’t been the only replenishment. The company has fixed some other holes that, while they won’t be the subject of a company press release, Buller is not shy to volunteer.
“Very simply, we had reliability problems [on our machines] and we only had the chance to work on the most urgent reliability problems,” he says. “When we started developing the XC [for example], we didn’t have enough people. We put all our efforts on the development of the Sapphire XC, froze development on everything else. We [also] have a lot of requests from customers for new materials for a long time, we just couldn’t do this. We didn’t have the resources to even think about this.”
VELO3D Sapphire XC.
Buller would later go further, describing the first machine sold to its first customer as ‘horrifically non-reliable.’
Though the company might have only had one plate spinning at all times, it never let it drop. From the start of 2019 to the end of 2019, VELO3D’s equipment failure rates are said to have dropped by five times. They achieved the same reduction in failure throughout 2020 and expect to have at least managed a reduction by four times again before the end of 2021.
As impressive as that is, there’s a sense that Buller would have liked to have seen those failure rates come down even faster. But time dictated how quickly VELO3D could improve. To get to a failure rate of one failure in every 10,000 hours, for example, you first need to run a printer for 10,000 hours.
“10,000 hours is a full year, so you can only start measuring these levels of performance when you have enough printers in the field that [collectively] operate 10,000 hours in a month, otherwise you just cannot measure that,” Buller says. “As our printers become more populous, and we print more, we have the resolution to observe things that are rarer and rarer, and we drive these improvements. When we had just three printers in the field, thinking about this level of performance was not measurable.”
The target is for VELO3D to make its technology as reliable as CNC machining, while the quality of the parts printed is another thing the company wants to tackle with its new resources. Buller does note, though, that even with its limitations to date, the technology has offered customers enough value and show enough promise.
If there is one achievement that we are going to accomplish in the next two years, it is to erect a grave piece on which the world will write, ‘Here rests DfAM. Rest in peace.'
As such, it hasn’t been too difficult to attract new customers. Just last month, Schoeller-Bleckmann Oilfield Technology announced its adoption of the Sapphire System to print complex parts in Inconel 718 according to EN 9100, ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 certifications. Buller anticipates the company using the Sapphire System to produce spare parts at a quick speed to help ease supply chain disruptions and would consider the oil and gas market as a key play.
In its three years since emerging from stealth, VELO keeps close to its customers, monitoring their desires and their pain points, and assisting where it can.
“Our customers are pushing the ambitiousness of their parts to levels that we didn’t dream of,” Buller says. “Every few weeks, we are getting customer needs that are more crazy, more ambitious, more imaginative and our application team is sitting in our technology team, so they have a very direct line of sight with our technology development team. We drive our roadmap of development based on the bottlenecks that we see there. We see all the limits of our manufacturing technology and we push them.”
Supplementing this is a ‘very data-oriented’ approach on its field service, where the company assesses the drivers of its machine downtime and failures and uses the information to feed the roadmap of reliability improvements on a monthly basis.
“The nice thing is that the needs that we see from any customers and driving what we do, feeds all the other customers,” Buller adds. “In a lot of open system companies, every customer solves their own problems, so you’ll find 30 customers solving exactly the same problem. In our case, we hear about this problem once, we solve it, all the customers benefit from it.”
Launcher’s Orbiter propellant tank printed out of Inconel using its first VELO3D Sapphire Printer.
Those customers include Honeywell, Boom Supersonic and Launcher – aerospace being another key market for VELO3D. While Honeywell has been more coy in its application of VELO3D technology since their partnership was announced in February 2020, Launcher revealed it would explore fuel pump, flight turbine housing and pressure vessel applications, with VELO’s contract manufacturing network facilitating production scale-up. Boom, meanwhile, rolled out its XB-1 aircraft with 21 flight components printed with VELO3D technology, many of them performing critical engine operations.
“I would say that the majority of our [aerospace] customers are using [our technology] to make higher performance engines. They can get better efficiency, higher energy density, power density, and more reliable engines with our technology,” Buller says. “There are [also] people that use it for spare parts, similar to the oil and gas industry. And similar to the oil and gas industry, the problem with spare parts and additive manufacturing is when you bring it to a spare part that really needs additive, the answer is, ‘it’s a great spare part, let’s redesign it.’ And that immediately kills any appetite and any business case to do that. The big thing that we provide is the opportunity to do spare parts without DfAM, without having to redesign the spare parts, because very often those are parts with very little consumption, so that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever to redesign them.”
From VELO3D’s perspective, the concept of designing for additive manufacturing is another imperfection – another hole in the blanket – to be addressed, albeit one perceived of additive manufacturing generally rather than specific to its own technology. It can be, of course, another hurdle and another barrier, and it’s one that VELO3D, as it bids to make its technology as reliable as CNC machining, wants to do away with. Leaning on the added resource its public offering provides and buoyed by the company’s track record, Buller is confident.
“Our role is very simple,” he finishes. “When people talk about industrialisation of additive manufacturing, I think they are mis-conceptualising it. It’s not about automation, it’s about making additive manufacturing capable. So, our role is to demonstrate that you can use additive manufacturing to streamline the development and production of much superior products without the baggage of the commodity legacy additive manufacturing. And if there is one achievement that we are going to accomplish in the next two years, it is to be able to erect a grave piece on which the world will write, ‘Here rests DfAM. Rest in peace.’”
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