On-demand manufacturing service provider Xometry has recently acquired Munich-based Shift, the largest On-Demand manufacturing marketplace in Europe. Through the acquisition, Xometry will expand into 12 new countries with a worldwide network of over 4,000 manufacturers.
The on-demand manufacturing service market has been growing in recent years, driven by the adoption of digital manufacturing technologies such as additive manufacturing, and CAD/CAM. As manufacturing supply chains shift from local to global, it’s less likely that an engineer or designer will walk into a local job shop with a drawing and order parts. Instead, online bureaus such as Xometry, Protolabs and Stratasys Direct, (to name a few) are offering value-added services such as instant quoting, manufacturability feedback and quick turnaround.
Within these services, production is the ultimate of what you might call high-mix, low-volume. To deliver fast lead times and low cost for a large volume of small orders, on-demand manufacturers must use industry 4.0 technology such as automation and IIoT. For example, at Protolabs, many orders are processed through quoting, toolpath programming, production and shipping with minimal human intervention. Xometry, on the other hand, has built a distributed network of partner shops that connect online to Xometry to receive and process orders.
“Global expansion is a key step for us,” said Xometry CEO Randy Altschuler. “Many of our customers, like BMW and Bosch, have a global presence and we can serve more of their needs with a global network. Our AI-driven algorithms and intelligent sourcing platform give us a competitive advantage as we expand across new geographies and manufacturing technologies.”
Dmitry Kafidov, Shift co-founder and Managing Director of Xometry Europe, agreed. He said, “We’re eager to leverage Xometry’s technology to continue to scale our business in Europe. We look forward to providing our customers additional manufacturing capabilities, including additive manufacturing and injection molding.”
Shift has a customer base that includes some of the leading manufacturing companies in Europe. Shift will operate as Xometry Europe and continue to be headquartered in Munich, Germany.
Xometry has raised $118 million since it was founded in 2013. Over the past two years, the company has grown from 100 employees to over 300 while more than doubling revenue each year. This growth indicates that distributed, on-demand manufacturing is likely to continue to grow as a key part of the manufacturing landscape.