Velo3D has just debuted as a publicly-traded company following its merger with JAWS Spitfire Acquisition Corporation. The additive manufacturing technology company—which is trading stocks under “VLD” on the New York Stock Exchange—has been provided with $274 million in capital to accelerate the growth of its metal 3D printing business.
Velo3D is best known for its end-to-end additive manufacturing solutions in the production of high-value metal parts, with customers ranging from SpaceX and Honeywell to Boom Supersonic, Chromalloy and Lam Research. Its products include the Flow print preparation software, Sapphire printers, and the Assure quality control system—all of which are supported by the company’s Intelligent Fusion manufacturing process. In Q4 of 2021, Velo3D plans to roll out its new Sapphire XC printer, which will reportedly manufacture parts 400 percent larger in volume and simultaneously reduce production costs by 65-85 percent.
As one of Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Companies in 2021, Velo3D has come a long way from its humble beginnings in 2014. Engineering.com had the opportunity to chat with Velo3D founder and CEO, Benny Buller—the unique man who made it all happen.
Engineering.com: Tell us the story of your journey from physicist to CEO of Velo3D.
Benny Buller: I’m a physicist [with a Master’s degree in electrical engineering]. For the first 10 years of my career, I worked in the technology unit of the Israeli Intelligence—kind of something between Mr. Q from the James Bond movies and the NSA. A lot of really cool and very valuable projects, and on one of those projects I got the national security award from the president of Israel. I moved to the United States in 2002, and worked in semiconductors [specifically, learning about electron-beam inspection and the precise measurement of yield and quality]. Later on, I moved and worked on solar energy and renewable energy on photovoltaics [in process control and in-situ monitoring], and I led the development of First Solar’s modules. First Solar is the only non-Chinese company among the largest 10 solar companies in the world, and I think it’s the only profitable solar company in the world. Then I became an investor for two years and stumbled upon the opportunity in the metal additive space—and that’s how I started Velo3D.
What made you realize that additive manufacturing technology was not living up to its promise? How was legacy metal AM limited in its capabilities?
I actually stumbled upon that by accident, working with a portfolio company that was trying to 3D print parts. They had been struggling to produce the parts they needed, so they had to change the design to accommodate that. I started to talk with more people that were using the technology. When I realized how limited the technology was, I was quite horrified to be honest.
The metal 3D printing technology, if you think about it, the ideal use case for that is those complex parts that have very complex internal structures, cavities and surfaces that are not accessible from the outside. Because if they would be accessible from the outside, you would just machine that using CNC—a fully digital manufacturing technology that has matured over the last 30–40 years, and is extremely capable, digital, and high performance.
So the parts that you would want to use additive manufacturing for, are those parts that you cannot machine effectively because they have surfaces that are not accessible from the outside. And it turns out that most of those parts are actually not naturally manufacturable by additive manufacturing because they would require supports, and those supports would be in places that are hidden from the outside and are therefore not removable using machining tools. Basically, you have a conundrum here: you have a technology that is a solution looking for a problem. The vast majority of the application field has not been accessible.
We heard you had an aha moment when talking with SpaceX. Could you tell us about that?
My aha moment was when I basically asked them point blank, “How valuable would it be if you had a technology that could eliminate your dependence on supports?” Their answer was that the vast majority of their parts, they can produce first shot, no problem. Then there are other components that they have to iterate a few times until they get it right. Maybe five percent of their components, they iterate again and again and again, trying to change the design, trying to print them in different ways until they have to give up on them.
When they did that, I wrote in my notebook, “For this customer, support-free is of marginal value.” Then one of the engineers in the room said, “You have to understand this answer. This is true because we have been printing parts using 3D printing for many, many years now. We know upfront what will work and what will not work, and we simply avoid the parts that you cannot make. But if we had the capability to print those five percent of parts, 100 percent of our parts would be like that.”
And that was the aha moment, the moment when I said, “If that’s the case, that’s what they should be working on to resolve this problem.”
How is Velo3D’s next generation additive manufacturing system different?
I think the big difference is not between the next generation system and competitors, but between all Velo3D systems. So all Velo3D systems are called Sapphire and fundamentally those systems can produce practically any geometry that has a minimum feature and a maximum size that fits within the envelope of the system. You don’t need to be enslaved to the limitations of additive manufacturing like you are with other systems. That’s the fundamental difference.
The second big difference is that all our systems are operating from the same print files, with the same manufacturing process, and allowing anyone to produce the same parts with the same outcomes from anywhere in the world, at any time. This is critical both to scale this technology as well as to reduce the cost and time of qualification. It is very different compared to the artisan approach where everyone can tweak their parameters and every system is somewhat different.
How does Velo3D’s technology transform manufacturing processes by reducing complex products down to single parts with better performance and less overall weight?
One of the most exciting applications of 3D printing is to take assemblies that today are made using tens or even hundreds of parts, and make them using one or very few number of parts. When you are trying to do that, what you’ll typically find is that the resulting parts are completely non-manufacturable by existing additive manufacturing technologies and systems. They are manufacturable with our systems.
In some of the cases, we were able to reduce the weight compared to the alternative by as much as 50 percent, allowing customers to use 50 times less parts and reduce delay time by about 10 times. The important thing is that we can allow customers to do that without having to compromise on performance. Whereas in the commodity additive manufacturing systems that have been out there before us, you would have to use this concept of design for additive manufacturing (DfAM) to really bastardize those designs and compromise a lot of the performance in the process, and the time it takes to develop that, frankly.
What’s your take on the future of 3D printing?
I think 3D printing has been, for too long, a solution looking for a problem—and I think we are changing that. A lot has been discussed regarding how difficult it is to change people’s minds and the paradigm of 3D printing, how difficult it is to educate the workforce about working with 3D printing. We are basically saying you can avoid those problems altogether.
If 3D printing was the magical technology that people on the outside think it is, it would have been much easier for engineers to design for it and take advantage of it. If the manufacturing technology was indeed so capable and so stable, it would also have been easier for engineering organizations to adopt it.
On one hand, we are making the technology much more capable, so that you can design parts more easily. On the other hand, we are making the technology a copy-exact, operating exactly the same way everywhere. Where you don’t need to have all the PhDs and material scientists to develop the manufacturing process for it, allowing organizations that understand machining to take advantage of this technology and start production with it.
This allows another important element, which is that most companies do not want to buy machines; they want to buy parts. So helping to establish the scalable contract manufacturing network that is utilizing copy-exact manufacturing methods, producing very predictable outcomes, helps companies get exactly the parts that they need without having to invest in capital and build the manufacturing technology in-house.
To put it all together, I see a future where it’s much easier for companies to engineer new products, taking advantage of 3D printing. Where it’s easier for companies to transition existing products to additive manufacturing, make supply chains much more agile and reliable, and utilize scalable, diverse, and localized supply chains to get the same outcomes, no matter where they are in the world.
Do you have a statement about Velo3D going fully public?
For us, this is a moment where we are getting the resources and visibility to accomplish our next goal. Our big goal is really to help innovative companies—and companies that are providing us with the infrastructure that we need to operate our existence here—move faster, innovate more, and be more efficient. The resources that we receive today and the transparency of our balance sheet would allow us to accelerate our journey and help all those customers (and customers of those customers) to benefit from our technology.
Did you have anything else you wanted to highlight?
The one thing that I would want to reiterate is this idea that DfAM has been the number one enemy of additive manufacturing technology. The advocates of additive manufacturing or 3D printing have confounded the benefits of DfAM, which are basically the idea of design enabled by additive manufacturing. Being able to do things that you couldn’t do with the concept of design constrained by additive manufacturing, which is being able to design in a way that would allow you to manufacture the parts.
Unfortunately, about 80 percent of DfAM is design constrained by additive manufacturers, but the industry has been minimizing this element and trying to market the enabling value of DfAM. All the challenges have been with the constraints, and are dealing with teaching the engineering workforce how to deal with those limitations. So I think that removing these limitations of DfAM—removing the tyranny of DfAM—will allow this industry to break free and proliferate in a much more impactful way than it was able to do in the last two decades.
To learn more about Velo3D, visit the website.