Formlabs Inc.

Mitch said, I'm trying to formalize under Cape Park Capital.

Will you come spend more time with us, work with our founders? And that was just so thrilling to me because I'd built software i built companies and now i got to understand the financing side and that just always interested me and sort of understanding that process and so i got pulled over in that i just learned so much about early stage investing from watching mitch do it successfully getting to do some successful things of my own from Mitch had done Uber, we did Twilio and Formlabs and Optimizing, Clever, lined up really, really exciting sets of businesses.

And then I went to a multi-staged firm because I wanted to learn what capital deployment looked like when you had a lot more money, not just at the inception stages.

And I got to do that at Canaan.

Dimension was there.

Formlabs was not there, which is...

I mean...

I was kind of bummed about that, to be honest with you.

And I like that smaller build volume.

We run a bunch of the 580s, and the quality of the parts, the way that it fuses, even though it's the same technology to the bigger commercial ones, there's something about printing in a smaller... where the thermals are better controlled that give you a really nice, consistent product.

And you also see that in the Formlabs, like the Formlabs One Plus, or

is it called Formlabs?

Yeah

... basically nothing 3D printer related except for a Formlabs SLA printer, which we still have.

Okay.

Yeah.

Because we have been looking at two different manufacturing methods.

So first off is the Lingster's direct silicone printing, but we also have looked at cocoon molding, axial molding with Formlabs.

I already spoiled it, we decided to continue with cuckoo molding because even though direct silicone printing gives a lot of advantages because you don't need a mold, you can directly print your silicone.

So the development process got way quicker than first printing a mold and etc.

There had to be a way to bring that technology into, you know, more kind of widespread applications.

So, That led to 3D printing, where I joined Formlabs in Boston, worked there for about four years.

And, you know, slowly kind of came to this realization that 3D printing, you know, at the time, this was back in 2018, so it's been a while now, was not really going to be a manufacturing technology in the short term.

And I really wanted to work on manufacturing, right? I wanted to work on this, like, digitization of manufacturing processes.

So I left Formlabs and started thinking about what is it that's stopping engineers from pushing forward with this world where computers are the things that make objects and run factories.

I'm pretty good at making things, but I'm not as good as a computer.

Computers are really good at making things.

And so, you know, I came to this conclusion through conversations with, you know, former customers that I'd gotten to know through the years, people who had been teammates of mine at Formlabs, you know, people I just kind of met through the community and manufacturing, that this kind of gap in data, this feedback loop, this ability to say, okay, Is this thing good or not? You know, the confidence in this new design program, this, you know, computer controlled, now we'd probably say AI controlled process, this new manufacturing method.

He's been in the eye care business for a very long time.

I actually met Matthias at Formlabs, which is a 3D printing company that kind of ballooned as we were starting there.

And so we were building electromechanical optical devices.

But prior to that, Matthias had actually worked at a company called EyeNetra.

one of a kind, but it wasn't quite the mass market kind of adoption that, and that was like really just cranking in his mind.

He was, I think, one of like maybe the first hire of that company, something like that.

And then all through Formlabs, I think, you know, we were having a blast building 3D printers and that was super fun.

But I think in the back of his mind, he was like, this is an unsolved thing.

Take Tesla, for instance.

The report notes that in 2026, Formlabs launched a new system called the Fuse X1.

And Tesla immediately utilized that machine to produce end-use parts and tooling directly for their production line.

And the volume is what really stands out here.