Freeform raises $67M Series B to scale laser AI manufacturing

The funding round, led by Apandion and backed by a consortium including AE Ventures, Founders Fund, and Nvidia’s venture arm, NVentures, will fuel a significant hardware leap. According to TechCrunch, the capital is earmarked to upgrade Freeform’s current “GoldenEye” printing system to a next-generation platform internally dubbed “Skyfall.” This move represents a massive scaling of ambition: where GoldenEye employs 18 lasers to fuse metal powder into parts, Skyfall is designed to utilize hundreds of lasers, with a production goal of thousands of kilograms of metal components daily.

This vision for high-volume manufacturing was born from frustration. CEO and co-founder Erik Palitsch and President Thomas Ronacher met while developing rocket engines at SpaceX. There, as reported by TechCrunch, they found existing industrial 3D printers for metal to be expensive, finicky, and poorly suited for mass production. They founded Freeform in 2018 to build a new kind of manufacturing platform from the ground up, one prioritizing high throughput and flexibility through active software control.

That software layer is where the “AI” in “laser AI manufacturing” becomes critical. Palitsch told TechCrunch that Freeform’s platform is “AI native,” a claim substantiated by a partnership with Nvidia. The company is leveraging advanced GPUs to such an extent that Palitsch stated, “I think we’re the only quote-unquote manufacturing company out there that has H200 clusters in a data center on site.” These clusters aren't for rendering graphics; they are running real-time, physics-based simulations to continuously learn and optimize every aspect of the manufacturing workflow, from design to finished part.

The company’s post-financing valuation was not officially disclosed, though PitchBook data cited by TechCrunch places it at approximately $179 million. This substantial investment, from a roster of elite tech investors, signals a continued belief that deep tech and hardware manufacturing can be revolutionized by a software-first, AI-driven approach. It’s a bet that the physical world can be made as malleable as a line of code.