Overall, the additive manufacturing (AM) industry has stayed impressively restrained in terms of trying to leverage any potential coattail hype from the AI boom. Perhaps the leading enterprises left standing after the collapse of previous hype cycles are those most likely to proceed with caution under such circumstances.
It’s not as if there are no audacious claims to be touted regarding the opportunity to combine AI and 3D printing, either. Maybe the clearest example is the growing number of startups built to deliver AI-powered text-to-3D model generation. One such company, Meshy, based in the heart of Silicon Valley (Sunnyvale), just landed the largest funding round to date amongst this emerging group: a Series B worth nearly $400 million.
What’s more, the company publicly announced its valuation for the first time. At $1.5 billion, it would count as one of the most valuable firms in the world in the 3D printing space. Meshy of course isn’t a pure-play 3D printing company, but the company does refer to the printability of its models as its “core differentiator”.
As Joris Peels wrote about a couple of months ago, Chinese 3D printing OEM Flashforge recently struck up a partnership with Meshy to integrate the text-to-image function into Flashforge software. Meshy notes in the press release about its Series B that “five of the world’s ten largest technology companies by market capitalization or valuation” are already working with the company. In addition to Flashforge, it names four other 3D printing companies that it’s working with, including Bambu Labs and Creality.
Interestingly, Meshy doesn’t name the participants in the Series B round, simply that all existing investors participated. This is the kind of situation where I’m inclined to believe that the silence means there’s some heavy hitters on that cap table. I find it at least somewhat notable that the company is headquartered in the same town as the Apple Wolfe campus, not to mention operations sites for a whole bunch of other tech megacaps, as well as the CHIPS for America Design and Collaboration Facility.
Meshy says it will use the funds from the Series B to support its expansion globally, as well as its R&D objectives. According to the company, as of this month it has over 12 million registered users, and its revenue has grown 12x year over year.
If you want to hear more about Meshy, listen to the latest edition of Printing Money.
Meanwhile, Meshy is also rolling out a host of new features, including upcoming 8K texture capabilities, and the unique ‘Meshy 3D Agent,’ already available, which turns a chat into a printable model. That should be a pretty attractive feature as the general AI chat user base grows.
It’s also unique that the company is already operating on a B2B and a DTC model, which is a hard line to straddle for the AM industry. But this feels like a product that’s fit to strike that balance. In that vein, Meshy’s offerings are a very obvious pipeline for working both consumers and businesses towards mainstream mass customization, which could be the ultimate endgame for the company’s business model.
Returning to the topic of the relatively conservative approach that has started to take hold in the AM industry, we seem to have lost track of the fact that, to the broader public, arguably the only really interesting thing about the underlying technology is the potential to manufacture an image into an object. It makes perfect sense why AM enterprises would lose sight of this, as, in an industrial setting, that’s not at all how things work.
But, maybe things could someday work kind of like that? That’s the dream that Meshy and other companies in its market segment are selling. If they can realize that dream even a little bit, that would not only represent the opportunity for quantifiable gains like revenue growth, but also, arguably more importantly, the opportunity for the sort of intangible wins that make people actually care about a technology.
Images courtesy of Meshy
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