Desktop Metal closes further $115 million in latest round of funding
July 17, 2017
Desktop Metal’s Studio System (Courtesy Desktop Metal)
Desktop Metal, Burlington, Massachusetts, USA, has announced the completion of a $115 million Series D investment round to further accelerate the company growth and adoption of its end-to-end metal AM systems. This brings Desktop Metal’s funding to a total of $212 million since its October 2015 inception, with this round reportedly marking the largest individual private round of funding ever received by a metal Additive Manufacturing company. The announcement comes within three months of the launch of Desktop Metal’s Studio and Production Systems.
The Series D round includes significant new investment from New Enterprise Associates, GV (formerly Google Ventures), GE Ventures, Future Fund and Techtronic Industries, a key provider of consumer, professional and industrial products through its subsidiaries Milwaukee Tool, AEG, Ryobi, Hoover, Oreck, VAX and Dirt Devil. Additional investors include Lowe’s, Lux Capital, Vertex Ventures, Moonrise Venture Partners, DCVC Opportunity, Tyche, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Shenzhen Capital Group and Saudi Aramco.
According to Ric Fulop, Desktop Metal’s CEO and Co-founder, this funding will help fuel the company’s speed to market, expand its sales programmes and progress the development of advanced R&D. The company is also exploring international expansion as early as 2018.
“We are on the brink of an exciting transformation in how metal parts will be designed, prototyped, and ultimately mass produced,” stated Fulop. “This latest funding puts us in an ideal position to ship our Studio System in the coming months and our Production System in 2018, while also enabling us to grow our company globally. The continued support of our investors underscores the power of our metal AM solutions to help engineers and manufacturers, for the first time, apply metal 3D printing for the entire product development lifecycle – from prototyping to cost effectively mass producing complex metal parts.”
Ric Fulop in one of Desktop Metal’s labs (Courtesy Desktop Metal)
“Our mission at GE Ventures is to invest in startups with cutting-edge technologies,” added Steve Taub, Senior Director of Advanced Manufacturing at GE Ventures. “Desktop Metal’s team and technology have delivered on exactly what they’ve promised: a vision to change the way parts are manufactured, with the innovative metal 3D printing technology to make that a reality. We see a huge potential for engineers to rethink the way parts and products are made both domestically and abroad.”
Dayna Grayson, Partner at New Enterprise Associates, commented, “We are blown away by the performance of the team and the technology at Desktop Metal, and that’s why we doubled down on our early investment in the company with our participation in this round. They have opened up a new frontier for 3D printing with the speed and quality they can attain, redefining the term ‘3D printing’ itself to mean much more than simply morphing a digital model into a physical model on a one-off basis. This could affect manufacturing and processes for decades to come.”
