Freeform Raises $67M for AI Manufacturing
AI-native manufacturing company Freeform has raised $67 million in a Series B round to scale its metal additive manufacturing platform. The funding highlights investor interest in deep-tech startups applying AI to physical infrastructure and industrial processes.
- The Series B round included participation from prominent investors such as Founders Fund, Two Sigma Ventures, and NVentures, the venture capital arm of NVIDIA. This brings Freeform's total funding to over $120 million, following a $45 million raise when it came out of stealth in 2023 and an additional $14 million in 2024. - Freeform was founded by former SpaceX engineers Erik Palitsch and TJ Ronacher, who applied their experience in accelerating rocket engine development to the manufacturing industry. Their vision is to offer "manufacturing as a service," allowing clients to access high-quality printed parts without the high costs and steep learning curve of traditional additive manufacturing systems. - The company's current system, "GoldenEye," uses 18 lasers to fuse metal powders into precise components. The new funding will accelerate the development of its next-generation platform, "Skyfall," which will feature hundreds of lasers and is expected to increase production capacity by more than 25 times and expand material offerings by tenfold. - A key part of Freeform's "AI-native" strategy involves using on-site NVIDIA H200 GPU clusters to run real-time, physics-based simulations of the entire manufacturing process. This data-centric approach allows the system to monitor and control the metal melting process with microsecond precision, continuously learning and optimizing for quality and speed. - The global metal additive manufacturing market is projected to grow significantly, with some reports estimating it will reach over $23 billion by 2035. This growth is driven by increasing demand from the aerospace, automotive, and healthcare industries for complex, lightweight components. - Freeform's approach is capital-intensive, as it involves building its own data center infrastructure within its manufacturing facilities, a departure from competitors who may rent cloud computing or use off-the-shelf controllers. The company is already delivering hundreds of mission-critical parts to customers in sectors like aerospace, defense, and energy.
