Our Investment in Metafold: Unlocking the Potential of Additive Manufacturing
StandUp Ventures is very excited to announce our investment in Metafold’s $1.8M USD seed round alongside our friends at Differential Ventures, Active Impact Investors, and Jetstream.
Founded by mathematicians Elissa Ross (CEO), Daniel Hambleton (CTO), and architect Tom Reslinski (COO), Metafold is on a mission to remove critical bottlenecks in 3D printing and unleash the ultimate promise of additive manufacturing.
Elissa, Daniel, and Tom are subject matter experts in the field of “volumetric design” and the concept of using lattice shapes in manufactured products using 3D printing. A lattice structure is a repeating pattern that, when connected, forms three dimensional shapes. Their use in products removes geometric constraints of a material, which gives products totally new physical capabilities and increased performance that would not be possible without them (e.g products with immense strength but with minimal material, high surface areas but with minimal volume).
Applications for lattice based design exist in every industry from energy management, light weighting, industrial filters and heat exchangers, athletic products, medical devices and more. Ultimately, the use of lattices enables the creation of new shapes that were not possible with conventional manufacturing processes by throwing out the geometric constraints of traditional methods.
Elissa outlined an exciting vision for what is possible with lattices in her article for “My Climate Journey”, here.
Today, 3D printing hardware can produce lattices based designs, but the software that feeds these printers cannot, and is holding back the potential of what can actually get printed. Existing design software struggles to process lattice geometry as they are so complex. Designing with lattices today is painfully tedious due to the clunky and brittle nature of geometry computations used in existing software. It can take 6+ minutes to process a single change in parameter in some existing tools and often just crashes the software altogether (imagine waiting 6 minutes for excel every time you change a number! 🤬). Furthermore, because these designs are so complex they produce huge file sizes that can take hours to download and transfer into a 3D printing program, or again, often crash the system entirely. This makes it very difficult and time-consuming to actually print any products that are designed with lattices.
Metafold removes these bottlenecks and gives designers and engineers the power to design and manufacture products using lattices. Metafold is a cloud-based volumetric CAD app that provides a huge library of lattice designs to start from, features extremely fast lattice creation and design changes, and is accessible via a SaaS UI or can be embedded into any workflow via API. Metafold solves the printing problem via a “streaming” file export technique that provides the printer with bite-sized aspects of the product at time vs. forcing the ingestion of a giant file size all at once. Unlike existing tools Metafold is entirely cloud-based and can run on any device (desktop/laptop/tablet/smart phone etc.) with no restrictions. Due to its cloud-native architecture and low compute requirements, it’s incredibly easy to collaborate and share designs built with Metafold using just a shareable link. This is versus the status quo sharing GB designs on flash drives, or running software for 30 min+ so it can be screen-shared before a pre-planned zoom meeting. Together these features enable a fundamental shift in capability and speed akin from going from dial-up to fibre.
Over the past decade, 3D printing has become mainstream in manufacturing circles. While the volume of use varies from company to company, indications are that the vast majority of manufacturers are using 3D printing in some format today and plan to increase their usage in the coming years. While the use of lattices in 3D printing design is in its early stages today, awareness of its benefits and interest in its applications is mainstream amongst additive manufacturing professionals but they are held back from building with them by the limitations of today’s software. We believe Metafold has an opportunity to remove a key barrier to lattice adoption in AM, and in doing that has the potential to be widely adopted by every manufacturer using 3D printing in the future.
We’ve been highly impressed with Elissa, Daniel, and Tom since we met them back in January 2022 and how much they’ve all grown as leaders in the year and half since we first connected. They are true subject matter experts in their field, and their collective skill-set and expertise in the space is rare. We believe they are uniquely qualified to solve this problem and embody all of the attributes StandUp looks for in a founding team.
As early stage investors, we’re privileged to interact with companies building impressive new products every day. But it’s rare to find a truly innovative technology with the potential to remove the fundamental constraints of an industry and unlock new and exciting possibilities in the process. We believe that Metafold is doing just that, and are excited to have the opportunity to play a small part in enabling thousands of engineers and designers around the world to build incredible things.
