Carbon3D Inc, a Silicon Valley start-up that is developing 3D printers to produce medical devices and automotive parts on demand, on Thursday said it had closed on US$81 million in funding that brought the total it has raised to US$222 million.
“We wanted to go find investors that share the scope of our vision and realize what we are talking about here is industrial reinvention,” Carbon vice president of product management Kirk Phelps told reporters at the company’s headquarters in Redwood City.
Founded in 2013, Carbon said the funding round was led by automaker BMW AG, industrial conglomerate General Electric Co, optics and imaging products company Nikon Corp and chemical manufacturer JSR Corp.
They joined earlier investors Google Ventures and top tech venture capital firm Sequoia Capital Operations LLC.
“They did an incredibly good job in getting investors,” said Terry Wohler of Wohler Associates, an additive manufacturing consultancy firm based in Colorado.
However, Wohler said that “the jury is still out” on whether Carbon’s technology can match the durability of injection molding, the current industry standard for producing plastic products, or come close to its price point.
The company’s first commercial 3D printer, the M1, is available for a US$40,000 annual subscription. It uses software that controls a photochemical process that balances the way ultraviolet light and oxygen react within a pool of polymer resin to print plastic objects.
Carbon has developed various resins to diversify what can be printed. It uses heat-resistant hard resins for exterior automotive parts and soft elastic biodegradable resins for medical devices such as heart stents.
The company said it can print up to 100 times faster than rival 3D printing companies.
That would be a selling point to the manufacturing industry, which until now used 3D printing primarily as a prototyping tool.
“You can imagine that if we give clients a great on-demand manufacturing tool, it’s not just the product that changes,” Phelps said. “It’s the business that changes.”
Carbon said it would use the proceeds and newly formed partnerships with JSR and Nikon to fund its first push into international markets and to develop its technology further.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained