Meanwhile, the Iran War is just the latest international development serving to remind everyone precisely how much we all still depend on fossil fuels. Before this, it was Israel’s war in Gaza, and before that, it was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which, after a nearly ten-year respite, reintroduced everyone to the idea that oil prices could trade above $100 a barrel.

Back in the early days of that last-mentioned conflict — likely to soon become the longest war on the European continent in centuries — I wrote a brief series titled “AM Drilldown”, aiming to contextualize the rise of additive manufacturing within the end of the era of cheap energy. However, because global powers, chiefly the US, responded so aggressively to what was, in retrospect, a rather brief period spent above the triple-digit threshold, the topic ultimately lost its prominence in the daily news cycle, and I put it aside.

The main premise the series was built on was that the decline in Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI) associated with dwindling cheap oil supplies will, over the long run, play a principal role in catalyzing demand for AM. There is a multifaceted rationale for this, from my perspective, but first (even though it’s more or less self-explanatory), let’s just define ERoEI: it is the ratio of the usable energy obtained from an extraction process to the energy required to fuel that process. For a system whose purpose is to create electricity, the consensus is that the ratio should be at least 3:1 to reach an overall economic break-even point for all those reliant on that system.

One study argues that oil reached its highest ERoEI in 1931 and natural gas reached its highest point in 1945, at respective ratios of 73:1 and 200:1. An article from 2023 on “the plummeting [ERoEI] of oil liquids” puts the current numbers for oil ERoEI at somewhere between 4 and 30, depending on the source location and type of oil, and somewhere between 20 and 40 for natural gas.

The author of that 2023 article concludes by cautioning about the imminence of an era of “energy cannibalism” for oil liquids, where we’re actually just as much energy is used to extract oil as can be gotten in return, which is, in a petroleum context, the very definition of how at least one thinker frames societal collapse. The author, warning of energy cannibalism, notes, “The concept of energy cannibalism is becoming increasingly relevant, as mounting energy use in oil production means the very resources needed for the transition to renewable energy may be constrained, particularly when viewed from a net-energy perspective and in terms of economic growth.”

A corroded metal handwheel that Petrobras’ polymer spare replaced.

What that means is that, since fossil fuels are required to support the energy transition away from them, the global economy has to start being very careful — and strategic — about how it spends its fossil fuel reserves going forward.

AM is so relevant against this backdrop, for one thing, because, going forward, material waste will be the world’s least tolerable, and one of the clearest advantages of AM over conventional manufacturing is its ability to minimize it. Currently, however, our entire economy is essentially dependent on wastefulness. This is just another way of stating the same problem inherent in the energy transition: if we could simply conjure the desired scenario into existence, with a clean energy, low-waste economy replacing the prevailing order as seamlessly as one PowerPoint slide replaces the previous one, everything would be fine.

But a clean energy, low-waste economy can only be produced in an environment where dirty energy and maximum waste are the laws of the land. This is why those responsible for the energy sector status quo, just like those responsible for the defense sector status quo, are now in a position where they have to disrupt themselves. As is already the case with defense, AM will become an indispensable part of that process.

Precisely this background accounts for what’s so significant about what, on the surface, is a somewhat mundane story about Brazilian oil giant Petrobras using AM to produce a polymer handwheel at an offshore drilling site in Latin America. I say “mundane” because, at this point in the AM industry’s history, a polymer handwheel isn’t such a miraculous technological achievement, especially considering the innovations that emerge from the defense sector’s AM activities on a more or less daily basis.

Non-metallic handwheel, 3D printed by Senai Cimatec using “state of the art” technology from Korall Engineering AS and HP machine.

However, this goes beyond the typical spare part, as it is the first DNV-qualified polymer component to be installed in the Latin American market. DNV, the world’s premier classification society for oil & gas and maritime, has been leading the effort to qualify spare parts for digital inventory platforms for years. Moreover, Latin America is now arguably the region that will be most significant to the oil & gas sector’s profitability for the foreseeable future.

The high-performance 3D printed polymer solution.

The central paradox of the energy transition is that it has the greatest likelihood of succeeding — and I would argue, can only succeed — if it’s led in large part by the oil & gas sector. With that in mind, at some point it will no longer be enough for oil & gas producers to track their ERoEI purely in terms of the energy involved in drilling and distributing fossil fuels (which, from another perspective, counts as Scope 1 emissions). Before too long, any honest accounting of the oil & gas sector’s ERoEI will have to take Scope 2 and Scope 3 emissions into consideration, as well, which means all of the supply chains indirectly involved in the oil & gas sector’s activities.

To truly accomplish that in full is likely impossible, given that there is virtually no link in all of the supply chains that exist globally that is not tied to oil & gas. But we have to start somewhere, and the ideal place to start may be the oil & gas sector’s own spare parts. Every molecule of hydrocarbons that can be removed from the equation for spare parts like the Petrobras handwheel can improve the ERoEI of the relevant drilling operation, compared to what that would be without Petrobras’s ability to print spares on demand.

Again, while it’s merely one spare part, it’s also far more than that because of the involvement of DNV and the growth potential in Latin America. In that sense, it is like a foot in the door for AM-enabled digital inventory in a market likely to be disproportionately impactful on the oil & gas sector’s future global sourcing strategies. The same way that Ukraine is a laboratory for 3D printed drones, Latin America could become a laboratory for 3D printed oil & gas spares.

Won’t things just go back to how they were before the Iran War started, the same way they did after Russia invaded Ukraine? Two things about that: one, I would push back very forcefully on the idea that things did “go back to normal” after Russia invaded Ukraine, given that, in less than four years, the world saw the emergence of another major oil-related conflict, one much more consequential to global energy markets than Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Secondly, the Iran War and the war in Ukraine aren’t just connected thematically; they’re connected materially, from a diverse range of angles. Most pertinently to the present discussion, the CEO of Saudi Aramco warned in 2022 that the world was running out of spare oil capacity. He and others argued that the real problem, when it came to the impact of Russia’s occupation on global oil markets, wasn’t so much the state of oil supply in 2022 and 2023, but the fact that the world was responding to that near-term crisis by spending all its long-term spare capacity. In a future crisis, in other words, there would be no such cushion to rely on.

That warning now looks to have been quite prescient, so we should take heed to the CEO’s latest word of caution, that the oil market may not “normalize” until at least 2027. To me, that seems, if anything, very optimistic. While energy markets have become a nightmare to forecast, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to entertain the possibility that what the oil market looks like, currently, is the new state of “normal”.

The team (Rafael Pacheco, Fabiano Rezende and Danilo Cunha) celebrating a giant leap for the Brazilian Oil & Gas industry.

Images courtesy of Petrobras

Now, a year after that initial funding announcement, the AMCRC has announced the first five research projects in its CORE program (which I assume stands for ‘Cooperative Research’). With just under AU$2 million in government funding, the remaining AU$11 million will come from matching commitments by industry partners and be rounded out by AU$7 million in in-kind contributions from AMCRC’s collaborators at research institutions and commercial sites.

The specific projects haven’t been disclosed yet, although AMCRC said this information will be revealed on a project-by-project basis as each one begins. Additionally, AMCRC did note the sectors represented: “aerospace, mobility and transport, medtech, mining and defence.” Pretty standard targets in the global context of AM acceleration hubs that the AMCRC fits into.

Despite Australia’s government renewing its prioritization of manufacturing funding in recent years, the nation’s manufacturing sector continues to contract, which is a rather similar state-of-affairs to other nations that have been trying to relocalize their manufacturing supply chains in the 2020s, most notably the US. On the other hand, Australian companies have also managed to make inroads into allied nations’ manufacturing bases — again, the US above all — with the US subsidiary of Australian maritime giant Austal the most prominent example.

In a press release about the funding of AMCRC’s first five CORE projects, AMCRC Managing Director Simon Marriott said, “This is a significant milestone for Australia’s manufacturing sector. These projects show industry is investing in additive manufacturing not just as an emerging technology, but as a critical pathway to stronger manufacturing capability, more resilient supply chains and globally competitive production. The level of collaboration and co-investment we’ve seen in this first funding round highlights the appetite to accelerate commercial outcomes and bring advanced manufacturing innovations to market faster.”

AMCRC Chair Susan Jeanes said, “These partnerships are creating the know how, infrastructure and industry connections needed to strengthen Australia’s additive manufacturing ecosystem. Importantly, they are helping translate world-class Australian research into real industrial capability and economic opportunity.”

Australia is a real wild card. The nation has so many of the necessary ingredients to support a manufacturing rebound, but its geographic isolation and, relatedly, its dependence on the US seem to be immovable obstacles standing in its way. In that sense, it’s a solid symbol for why it’s tempting to view reshoring as nothing more than a pipe dream.

At the same time, you could also view those same weaknesses as potential strengths, under the right circumstances. The US military is prioritizing Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) more highly than ever via its advanced manufacturing objectives, which means that we may have reached a moment where the US needs Australia as much as Australia needs the US.

No one is going to take my advice on this, but that gives me the advantage of getting to throw some outside-the-box ideas out there. If I were running the Australian government, I would become the anti-US, at least in terms of how the US is currently (mal)functioning. A perfect example is immigration. Despite claims from the typical right-wing disinformation campaigns that can be found in every Eurocentric nation across the world, Australia’s immigration inflows have completely stagnated.

Why not go in the opposite direction that the US and European nations are moving in, and try to actually attract more immigrants — especially those from Southeast Asian populations, who have experience in the semiconductor industry? Australia recently announced it will build its first chip-packaging plant, and I think that AM-backed advanced packaging would be an absolutely genius capability for the nation to put at the center of its economic future.

The only reason not to do that is that it would ruffle a lot of geopolitical feathers, which is the main thing preventing all bold innovative ideas from getting off the ground these days. Perhaps it would end up being more trouble than it’s worth. But Australia is actually firmly grounded in the Indo-Pacific region; the US mostly just meddles around out there. In the long run, I feel like it’s clear which party needs the other one more.

Images courtesy of AMCRC

But 14 Trees has experience in difficult places and has been engineered in India, and with the experience of working in those places, it should help the printer work in remote environments. It’s one thing to make something that works perfectly in a factory, but another to get it to work well in the field amid intermittent power, dust, and poor roads. In remote, austere environments, the need for 3D construction printing is greatest. What’s more, in these environments, construction 3D printing becomes more financially viable than alternative methods that rely on easy road transport of goods.

The printer has a total area of 240 square meters. The printer has a height of 10 meters, the mixer has a capacity of 250 liters, and can mix up to 5 m3/hr. The pump can deliver up to 5 m3/h at 60 bar, up to a distance of 100 meters.

The Cedar 3D Concrete Printing in action. Image courtesy of Tvasta.

The printer is meant to be a reliable, scalable device. The system uses AI for material characterizations and has been optimized for regular concrete, which should make adoption easier. The AI system can take your local formulations and analyze the best possible ones for a particular application. Using regular concrete also means you can use it wherever you are printing, which is much cheaper than importing some or all of it.

14Trees, CEO Francois Perrot said,

“Automated construction technologies have already demonstrated strong technical viability. For these technologies to scale across the global construction industry, they must also make strong economic sense for developers and contractors. Cedar was designed to dramatically improve project economics, lower adoption barriers, and enable construction companies to deploy automation at scale.”

Meanwhile, Tvasta CEO Adithya V S stated that,

“By combining advanced manufacturing capabilities with cutting-edge robotics, software, and scalable engineering systems, Cedar delivers a robust and reliable platform built for deployment across highly diverse construction environments globally.”

The Cedar 3D Concrete Printing in action. Image courtesy of Tvasta.

The hopeful thing about this collaboration is that the two have previously worked together on building projects around the world. This means that this device is steeped in experience. That would lead to a world-ready 3D printer made to work at the construction site. On the downside, these two decided to make their own printer rather than turn to their erstwhile supplier COBOD. Will more firms want to do the same? Will people develop their own solutions globally? Will we see the emergence of many more whole solution firms? Or will there be a stable group of vendors supplying the whole solution? Or will we see people just sell one part of the solution? It’s early days yet, so we don’t know how this industry segment will develop.

So far, in the gantry space, COBOD has led by a country mile. The Danish firm is trusted and a true global player. Maybe new firms will join it and together propel the market forward. Construction 3D printing is a burgeoning field with great potential. The most interesting area to me is austere construction. Construction of infrastructure and buildings in remote areas that are difficult to access by car. There, the technology makes the most sense to me. So this partnership is notable and may point to a future in developing nations and remote areas. At the same time, on-site printing for large construction projects in wealthier, more accessible parts of the world makes sense because it reduces labor costs. And making precast parts efficiently in a factory also makes a lot of cost-saving sense. In all of these modalities, gantry systems compete with robot-arm systems. For large projects and long-term steady printing, the gantry clearly wins. The robot arm is better at quick setups and faster prints of smaller areas. With a new entrant, we should see a sharpening of the differences between players. Companies will increasingly specialize and differentiate themselves for specific clients and applications. 3D construction printing is growing, and new competition should spur more innovation and growth in this vibrant segment of our market.

The shift is not sudden. It has been building steadily, driven by compounding improvements in machine reliability, materials qualification, post-processing capability, and, critically, economics. But there is a point at which gradual change becomes a new reality, and for additive manufacturing in serial production, we have reached it.

The repeatability problem has been solved

The most persistent objection to additive in production has always been consistency. Can part 1,000 be identical to part one? Historically, the honest answer was: not reliably enough. That has changed.

Modern powder bed fusion technologies, combined with post-processing methods such as vapour smoothing and bead blasting, now deliver standardised mechanical properties and surface finishes across entire batches. The surface quality is not quite injection moulding, but for the vast majority of end-use industrial applications, it does not need to be. Functional performance is the threshold that matters, and today’s systems clear it comfortably.

This matters enormously for procurement teams and engineers who bear risk for parts entering real production environments. Qualification used to be the sticking point. Increasingly, it is not.

Speed and capital efficiency have changed the calculation

Injection moulding is optimised for high-volume, stable production runs. When you know you need 100,000 identical parts, and the design is locked, the economics are hard to beat. But that scenario describes a shrinking share of modern manufacturing requirements.

Tooling lead times of up to 12 weeks, combined with upfront mould costs that can run to tens of thousands of pounds, create genuine commercial risk when design iteration is likely, launch windows are tight, or volumes are modest. Additive removes that exposure entirely. A design change means updating a CAD file, not commissioning a new mould. A batch of several hundred to a few thousand parts can be delivered in days, not months.

For companies navigating product launches under time pressure or managing low-to medium-volume production across varied SKUs, this is not a niche advantage. It is a structural one.

The complexity advantage remains underutilised

One area where additive consistently outperforms traditional methods, and where industry adoption is still catching up with the potential, is geometric complexity.

Features that would require expensive mould sliders or multi-part assemblies in injection moulding are simply printed. Internal channels, undercuts, lattice structures: the constraints that shape conventional design thinking largely disappear.

The issue is that most parts being sent to additive manufacturing have not been designed for it. They have been designed for conventional manufacturing and transferred across. The economics of that approach are limited. When engineers instead design with additive in mind, using part consolidation, topology optimisation, and structures informed by how the material actually behaves, the results improve substantially. The bone’s lattice structure, for example, achieves greater strength than a solid equivalent. Applied intelligently to industrial parts, that principle unlocks performance and material efficiency that conventional methods cannot replicate.

This is arguably the most underdeveloped opportunity in the sector right now, and it requires a shift in engineering culture as much as a shift in tooling strategy.

Where the market is heading

The data supports what we see in practice. Additive Manufacturing Research (AM Research) estimates that additively manufactured parts will account for about $24.5 billion in market impact in 2025. According to its “AM Applications Analysis: Parts Produced 2025–2034” report, the value of parts produced with additive manufacturing could reach $110 billion by 2034, suggesting that 3D printing is continuing to move beyond prototyping and into real manufacturing.

The verticals leading this shift are consistent with what you would expect. According to AM Research, aerospace applications make up nearly 22% of the total value of metal parts produced with additive manufacturing around the world. As governments and private space companies continue pouring money into rockets, satellites, and drones, the defense and space sectors also play a big role. The report also says that while aerospace leads in value, healthcare dominates in the number of metal parts produced. The orthopedic and biomedical industry produced more than two million metal AM parts in 2025, while the dental sector produced over 25 million during the same period.

Each of these sectors combines demanding performance requirements with exactly the kind of complexity, customisation, and volume profile where additive offers a genuine alternative to conventional methods. The energy sector, which invested heavily in additive manufacturing during a period of infrastructure constraint, is another example of an industry that made the transition and has not looked back.

What procurement and engineering teams need to consider

For organisations that have not yet integrated additive into their production strategy, the barrier is rarely technical. It is more often a combination of unfamiliarity with current capabilities, uncertainty about cost comparison, and understandable caution about introducing an unproven process into an established supply chain.

The practical answer to that caution is to start with a contained, well-defined use case. A part with time-to-market pressure, a component with complex geometry that is expensive in conventional tooling, or a low-to-medium volume run where tooling investment does not make financial sense: these are natural entry points. The risk of testing is low. No advance commitments are required, and the cost comparison with conventional methods can be evaluated directly before any decision is made.

The question for most organisations is no longer whether additive manufacturing is viable for production. It is whether their supply chain strategy is positioned to take advantage of it.

Nikolaus Mroncz, Head of Sales Engineering, Xometry

Nikolaus Mroncz has over a decade of experience in advanced manufacturing and currently leads the sales engineering department at Xometry Europe, an AI-powered on-demand manufacturing marketplace.

Since traditional implants are often made from rigid materials that do not naturally work well with the body’s soft tissue, researchers have been searching for more flexible alternatives, ones that don’t have problems like irritation, inflammation, and scar tissue forming around implantable bioelectronics. So these new devices, developed by a team at the university’s College of Engineering, are flexible enough to stretch and move with arteries instead of fighting against them. In fact, the Penn State team believes its new approach could help solve some of those problems.

The work focuses on hypertension, or high blood pressure, which affects nearly half of adults in the United States and roughly 1.28 billion people globally. For many patients, medications and lifestyle changes are enough to manage the condition. But about one in ten people with hypertension have what doctors call “drug-resistant hypertension,” which means their blood pressure stays dangerously high even after taking multiple medications. And that is exactly where these new implants come in.

To tackle that problem, the researchers created a soft bioelectronic device called “CaroFlex,” a small, stretchy implant around the size of a fingertip. It is designed to attach to the carotid sinus, an important region near the carotid artery that helps regulate blood pressure through something known as the baroreflex.

Often described as “the body’s built-in pressure sensor,” the baroreflex constantly monitors how much the blood vessels expand as blood moves through them. So, when blood pressure rises too high, specialized nerve endings in artery walls signal the nervous system to bring it back down. Scientists have studied ways to electrically stimulate this system for years, but many earlier devices relied on rather rigid implants that could damage tissue or become less effective over time.

The figure demonstrates the impact CaroFlex had on systolic arterial pressure (SAP), diastolic arterial pressure (DAP), and mean arterial pressure (MAP) in rodent models. The team compared readings taken from before and after stimulation, using four different electrical frequencies, reporting that CaroFlex reduced average levels across all domains. Image courtesy of Tao Zhou.

A look back

Penn State’s implant belongs to a newer area of medicine known as bioelectronic medicine, or neuromodulation, where devices use electrical signals to interact with nerves and the body’s natural reflexes. Researchers have been studying these kinds of treatments for high blood pressure since at least the early 2000s. One of the best-known examples was CVRx’s Rheos system, which used a pacemaker-like device implanted near the chest and connected to electrodes placed near the carotid artery in the neck to stimulate the body’s natural blood pressure response.

Those earlier systems worked, but they relied on pretty rigid materials and wiring. Since arteries constantly expand and contract with every heartbeat, hard implants can be difficult for the body to handle over long periods of time.

Penn State’s newer CaroFlex device is designed differently. The fingertip-sized implant is soft and stretchy, allowing it to bend and move more naturally with the artery itself instead of behaving like a hard object attached to soft tissue. Penn State’s approach is different because the device is soft and stretchable.

But softness was not the only problem the team tried to solve. The researchers also wanted to avoid another issue that is quite common in implantable devices, and that is stitches. Many implants need sutures to stay attached to tissue, but arteries constantly move and stretch with every heartbeat. And over time, those stitches can irritate or damage surrounding tissue.

To get around that problem, the Penn State team developed a “suture-free” design using a soft adhesive hydrogel layer that gently sticks directly to the artery itself. However, that does not mean the implant can be placed without surgery onto the artery, at least in its current experimental stage, but the adhesive does remove the need for stitches to hold the device in place.

3D printing meets bioelectronics

According to the university, the team used 3D printing to build the implant from flexible materials that can bend and move naturally alongside arteries. They also developed an adhesive layer that allows the implant to stick gently to biological tissue without causing major irritation.

“For many patients, even taking a combination of three to five medicines doesn’t alleviate their high blood pressure,” said Tao Zhou, research team leader, author of the study, and an assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics at Penn State. “In these cases, bioelectronic devices that use electrical signals to modulate the body’s natural response systems offer a promising form of alternative treatment.”

3D printing allows the team to produce bioelectronics faster and with better biocompatibility to the body’s soft tissues than traditional fabrication methods. Image courtesy of Tao Zhou.

For the 3D printing industry, the project also highlights the growing area of research of soft bioelectronics and implantable medical devices. Since traditional manufacturing methods often struggle to produce electronics that are both flexible and highly customized, 3D printing has allowed researchers to create small structures with unique shapes, soft materials, and designs that can better match the body’s natural movement.

Interestingly, CaroFlex is not the first soft bioelectronics project from Tao Zhou’s lab. Earlier this year, the team unveiled experimental 3D printed brain sensors designed to sit directly on the surface of the brain and record electrical activity. The soft hydrogel-based sensors were customized to match the exact folds and curves of individual brains, which researchers hope could reduce irritation and improve performance compared to traditional rigid electrodes.

Like CaroFlex, the project focused on creating electronics that behave more like living tissue instead of relying on hard, one-size-fits-all hardware. Zhou’s lab has also published plenty of research on direct ink printing, conductive hydrogels, and multi-material 3D printing for soft implantable electronics. In fact, images released by Penn State show the devices being printed through syringe-like extrusion systems that deposit soft conductive materials layer by layer.

The soft bioelectrodes use a honeycomb-inspired design that allows researchers to stretch them onto the specific geometry of a patient’s brain, without sacrificing structural strength or sensitivity to electrical and physiological signals. Image courtesy of Tao Zhou.

This is also part of a broader trend in healthcare. Over the last several years, researchers around the world have been looking at flexible electronics for everything from “smart” bandages and wearable sensors to brain implants and soft robotics. Penn State itself has been active in the field, recently showing projects involving hair-thin EEG monitors, emotion-detecting wearable sensors, and systems that can monitor wounds in real time.

Still, turning experimental implants into approved medical products is never simple. Long-term durability, safety testing, manufacturing scale-up, and regulatory approval are all still major hurdles. So far, the technology has only been used on animals. The device was tested in rodents, where researchers said it reduced hypertension while causing far less damage to surrounding tissue compared to more traditional implants.

Conexeu’s 3D printed breast matrix or “B.R.E.A.S.T.” Image courtesy of Conexeu.

Now Conexeu is developing what it calls the B.R.E.A.S.T. platform, short for Bio-Regenerative Ergonomically Architected Smart Tissue. The company says the technology uses 3D printed extracellular matrix (ECM)-based biomaterials designed to support soft tissue regeneration after breast reconstruction procedures. The broader regenerative platform is being developed under the CXU regenerative brand.

Conexeu CEO Miles D. Harrison said,

“For more than 50 years, breast reconstruction has been defined by substitution, replacing what was lost with a foreign body. We are fundamentally shifting the paradigm from substitution to restoration. Conexeu was founded on the belief that the promise of regenerative medicine is real, but only if it is supported early, advanced with rigor, and translated into clinical practice. The field has accepted repair and implants as the ceiling. We refuse to. If we settle for those limitations, true bio-regeneration will remain out of reach.”

While the firm’s Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Claudia Chavez-Munoz, stated,

“We did not set out to design a better implant. We set out to eliminate the need for one. By combining controlled 3D architecture with a biomimetic extracellular matrix, we are developing a structure that the body can recognize, integrate, and ultimately replace with its own living tissue.”

Conexeu director Dr. Z. Paul Lorenc added,

“The Conexeu platform is grounded in more than ten years of preclinical evidence across eleven peer-reviewed publications and proprietary preclinical data. Nothing can be more beneficial to a patient than knowing their own body could have the ability to repair and regenerate itself. Whether for reconstructive purposes or for aesthetic autologous breast and body enhancement, Conexeu’s 3D bioprintable matrix offers the potential towards true regenerative medicine.”

Conexeu’s 3D printed breast matrix or “B.R.E.A.S.T.” Image courtesy of Conexeu.

The implant will act as a temporary scaffold that guides the body to gradually replace the structure with its own tissue. The company contrasts this with traditional breast implants made of plastic that remain permanently in the body. The company is printing a regenerative, bioresorbable structure made out of extracellular matrix proteins. This seems different from the polycaprolactone-seeded with cells approach that BellaSeno uses, or the PLLA/PLA that Lattice uses. Conexeu says that its solution is “designed to provide both mechanical support and biological support intended to facilitate direct tissue remodeling rather than merely occupying space.” I’m not sure what this difference actually means, but a new approach could give them a different path to their own IP and solution. But it’s also unclear how this process is actually supposed to work.

Generally, an extrusion-based bioprinter can make a custom structure, and the resulting material is gradually replaced with the body’s own tissue. The differences could lie in the extent of remodeling. With remodeling, the tissue can be simulated much more realistically than simple grown tissues previously have been. It’s unclear which technology or approach actually enables the firm to do this.

Dr. Chavez 3D prints Conexeu’s breast matrix or “B.R.E.A.S.T.” Image courtesy of Conexeu.

The company also has a Ten Minute Tissue product that lets you inject room-temperature ECM into a patient. The company has raised $5 million on an online equity raising platform called Equifund, explaining, “What if we could repair skin like we repaired drywall?” The company there disclosed that it has previously raised $2.6 million. Conexeu is commercializing a University of British Columbia collagen solution and has had an IPO. The company is pre-revenue and has spent $3.9 million in 2025 and $1.7 million in Q1. The firm now holds over $6 million in cash, which should see it through this year. The company is planning a direct listing on Nasdaq on the 21st of May. This listing of 9.4 million shares by current investors will result in their shares being sold, but not provide the firm with additional capital. This is worrying. It is unclear how the company wants to raise additional money after this offering. It is also unclear why the current listing is a sale by investors rather than a capital raise.

Conexeu’s claims seem to be rather optimistic. I can’t really map what they want to do with the current 3D prints and how this will easily and quickly lead to a solution. The company also says it plans to pursue the FDA’s 510(k) pathway for certain indications, despite presenting the technology as a highly novel regenerative solution. I’m rather skeptical about their claims.

“The cool factor carries you to a point. But not a sustainable point,” Church said. “Early demonstrations were impressive, often even spectacular, but they did not always translate into real-world performance or viable manufacturing. The industry could generate excitement, but it struggled to generate adoption.” 

That’s a big part of what has held back additive electronics, Church told me during my visit to nScrypt’s headquarters in Orlando. The executive and AM industry veteran traces the roots of this effort back to the late 1990s, when DARPA began pushing for what would later be called additive electronics. 

“At the time, the expectations were aggressive, even by DARPA standards. Researchers were asked to print fine-feature electronics, including resistors, capacitors, inductors, and antennas, on unconventional substrates such as paper, all while maintaining low temperatures and tight tolerances,” he recalled. “They said, we want 10 micron line widths. We want you to print on paper. We want resistors, capacitors, inductors, antennas, and batteries. That was 1999… super challenging.” 

The funding was substantial, and the technical progress was real. But once those programs ended, the industry was left to stand on its own, and that is where reality set in. 

“Materials were not yet ready. Performance did not match what engineers were used to. And perhaps most importantly, additive systems were not competing in a vacuum; they were competing against decades of refinement in traditional electronics manufacturing,” Church went on. “We sort of stubbed our toe. Our performance was not good.” 

The gap was especially clear when it came to materials. Traditional electronics are built around copper, which has become the industry standard not because it is perfect, but because it is consistent, cost-effective, and deeply integrated into design and manufacturing workflows. Additive systems, in contrast, often relied on silver-based materials, which behave differently and come with their own tradeoffs. 

“Industry was used to copper. All the design specifications were around the conductivity of copper. We mostly dealt in silver; it didn’t oxidize, but it’s considerably more expensive. That’s where things start to break down. Even when additive works, it doesn’t always match what engineers expect, because those expectations come from copper. So a lot of the time it’s being judged against standards it was never meant to meet,” Church explained. “If I tell you, ‘I could make that phone for you, but all you could do is call grandma,’ you’re gonna say, ‘that is so cool… but no thanks.’” 

An nScrypt 3Dn-450-HP system, a “Factory in a Tool” (FiT) 3D manufacturing system designed for multi-material, high-speed, and high-resolution production.

Over time, that disconnect forced nScrypt to change how it approached the market. Instead of trying to replace traditional electronics completely, the company began focusing on where additive manufacturing could offer something fundamentally different. 

“Whether we like it or not, we are competing with state-of-the-art. That realization led to a more grounded strategy for us, one that emphasized fit over ambition. Rather than attempting to replicate entire devices, we began identifying specific use cases where additive methods provide clear advantages.” Then he added, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. That’s how we look at it. Where do we fit? We fit one bite at a time.” 

That idea has become something of a guiding principle for the company. Additive electronics won’t happen all at once; it will grow step by step, where it actually solves real problems. 

And those “bites” show up where traditional electronics start to struggle. That includes things like printing on curved parts, flexible circuits, or building electronics into structures: things that flat boards just can’t do. 

“The people we’re most successful with are the ones who have real pain points,” Church said. “They tell us, ‘We have a problem that a flat board can’t fix,’ and that’s when we say, ‘Okay, let’s talk.’” 

Ken Church and Vanesa Listek at nScrypt headquarters.

At the same time, Church is careful to define the limits of the technology. Not every application is a good fit, and not every problem should be approached with additive methods. 

“If you need a million [dots] a second, then that’s not for us. That is not who we are. And that level of clarity is important in a field that has often been driven by broad claims.” 

It too reflects a change in the message. Rather than positioning additive electronics as a “next generation” solution, nScrypt has begun framing it as something more immediate and practical. 

Even with that shift, one of the biggest challenges is still the mindset. Engineers and designers are still trained within the constraints of traditional materials and processes. Their tools, their assumptions, and their expectations are all built around those systems, noted Church. 

“All your designers learned how to design around copper. All your software was set around copper. When additive enters that environment, it is often judged against those same benchmarks, even when those benchmarks do not apply. We still make a great circuit,” he said. “But because we did not match your specifications, therefore, we were a failure.” 

To move forward, Church argues that the industry needs to rethink how success is defined. Instead of asking whether additive matches traditional specifications, the more important question is whether it achieves the same functional outcome. 

When those circuits work, whether they’re flat, flexible, or printed on a curve, the conversation starts to change. At that point, AM isn’t just a novelty; it becomes a real tool.

This article is the first in a three-part series based on 3DPrint.com’s visit to nScrypt’s headquarters in Orlando and conversations with Ken Church.

Images courtesy of 3DPrint.com

The Flashforge Creator 5. Image courtesy of FlashForge.

Flash Studio will now let you turn a file into a multi-color 3D print quite simply. The integration is for the Creator 5 printer. The Creator is a very important machine for Flashforge. Competitors like Bambu Lab, Snapmaker, Elegoo, and Creality have surged ahead while former mainstay Flashforge has lingered. The brand needs to make the leap to more software-centric machines that deliver on speed and reliability.

The quad-toolhead Creator starts at around $800 and is said to reduce purge waste during multi-color printing. Flashforge has also looked at optimizing the laminar airflow across the bed and air purification. Toolheads reportedly swap in 7 seconds, and the firm says the system can print color parts up to 4 times faster than comparable Bambu Lab systems. The CoreXY printer offers a 256 × 256 × 256 mm build volume, vibration compensation, automated bed leveling, and TPU support. The machine seems sensible. But in a crowded desktop space already filled with excellent printer options, we don’t know yet if that is good enough.

Meshy AI’s platform can generate printable 3D models and textures directly from text prompts. Image courtesy of Meshy AI.

The Meshy integration could give Flashforge an edge and make it easier to make things. The company promises true one-click conversions from AI files to prints. They say that they have “texture-to-filament color mapping works directly with the Creator 5’s four-head, zero-purge architecture, so what users see on screen maps to filament colors without manual assignment in the slicer.”

Manual color assignment is no longer needed. Slicer configuration is automatic as well. Overall, this should make it easier to print with color. A user can now also, in Flash Studio, describe an object, and an STL is generated, textures are mapped to filament colors, and the user can then print. Then the quad tool head Creator will print it. The company also thinks that these tools will give their prints a harder surface and smoother curves.

Software is moving to the fore in 3D printing. Formlabs has a closed system that makes printing easy and repeatable. This system is now being replicated by several of the largest desktop 3D printing vendors. Under threat is the open-source, open-architecture world of desktop material extrusion. Often, these firms do use tools like Klipper, Orca, and others, but the UI grafted onto them is very much a proprietary thing. Through server-based tools and operations, more is being done away from the user, centralized by the manufacturer. This is leading to difficulties as some firms are unable to compete in software. Other open-source firms are also having to work harder to keep up with slick interfaces. And specialized, smaller 3D printer builders will find it difficult to keep up with the latest technologies. Power is being concentrated in the hands of far fewer firms that sell millions of printers. Flashforge is now turning to an external party and AI to stay ahead of the curve. Will it work? We shall see as the competition on the desktop continues, now moving from machine control and tool pathing to authoring.

ATLIX Consolidates Presence in Spain with Strategic Distribution Partnership

In a recently announced strategic distribution partnership, ATLIX, which manufactures industrial-grade metal LPBF systems, has appointed Excelencia Tech Group as its official distributor for the Spanish market. Based at DFactory Barcelona, Excelencia Tech is supported by a team of AM experts and operates a national network of three offices across Spain, covering the entirety of the AM workflow, both metals and polymers. ATLIX was born from the AM division of TRUMPF, and the Spanish market is an important territory for the brand, what with its strong base in aerospace, automotive, and industrial manufacturing. Per the distribution agreement, Excelencia Tech will bring the TruPrint LPBF platform from ATLIX to Spanish industrial manufacturers, offering customers access to sales, application support, and service through a local partner, while also consolidating ATLIX’s commercial presence in Spain.

Marino Ferrarese, Head of Sales and Marketing, ATLIX, said, “Spain is a strategically important market for ATLIX, and Excelencia Tech is exactly the kind of partner we look for: deep technical expertise, proven service infrastructure, and a shared commitment to driving real industrial adoption of metal additive manufacturing.”

Timeplast Closes $5 Million Regulation CF Campaign, Powered by DealMaker

Materials science company Timeplast, which pioneers sustainable materials and AI-enabled 3D printing, announced the close of its oversubscribed $5 million Regulation CF campaign, powered by the DealMaker investment technology platform. This raise added nearly 10,000 new retail investors to the company’s cap-table: the same investors who purchased thousands of its sustainable straws just six hours after they launched. Timeplast has over 80 proprietary 3D printing filaments in its portfolio, including what it calls the first 3D printable soap and a retroreflective holographic filament. The company is now developing its next big product, a sub-$1,000, AI-powered 3D printer called the Manifester that will potentially turn voice commands into finished objects. Instead of routing the buyers of this recent campaign through a marketplace, Timeplast ran the offering through DealMaker’s white-labeled platform, so it could maintain ownership of the investor data and have a direct path to the community backing its products.

“We didn’t want to rent our investor relationships. DealMaker lets us own the data and build a direct relationship with the people backing us,” said Manuel Rendón, CEO and Founder, Timeplast. “That’s a fundamentally different outcome than showing up as one logo among many.”

IMDEA Materials & UC3M Collaborate to Better Understand 3D Printed Metals

A team of researchers from IMDEA Materials and the Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) worked with research institutes in Japan and France to better understand fracture mechanics of 3D printed metals. They had a major breakthrough and found how 3D printed metals can fail under extreme impact. As they explained in their paper, the researchers focused on AlSi10Mg and Ti-6Al-4V, both commonly used alloys in LPBF 3D printing. At the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), the team used strong X-ray beams to look inside the materials in real time while they were being struck at velocities of up to 750 meters a second. At first, the material is compressed by the shock wave, which causes pores to collapse. But, as the material starts to experience tension, the pores reopen and grow larger, eventually linking together to form an internal crack that leads to a Spall Fracture, which is harder to detect and analyze. This research could be very helpful for applications with components exposed often to intense dynamic loads, like aerospace and defense.

“Altogether, this paper provides new insights into dynamic tensile fracture of 3D-printed metals. It does so by leveraging the latest advances in fast X-ray phase-contrast imaging and high-resolution tomography, while establishing a systematic protocol to investigate void collapse and spall failure mechanisms in porous materials subjected to shock loading,” explained Dr. Javier García Molleja, a researcher from IMDEA Materials.

Bieber and Skylrk also released a 3D printed sneaker at the end of last year with Zellerfeld, the Brooklyn-based, avant-garde design house responsible for a large chunk of the direct-to-consumer (DTC) products launched in partnership with celebrity-owned brands that have popped up in recent years. Around the same time as its Biebs collab, Zellerfeld also announced the launch of a basketball shoe prototype in partnership with Celtics’ All-Star Jaylen Brown’s 741 Performance.

Considering the Brooklyn company’s repeated work with Nike, Zellerfeld may see deals with athletes as an attractive lane going forward, especially given how common it has become for professional athletes to pursue second careers as entrepreneurs. Baron Davis, who just launched the fashion brand OverDose on the back of his own 3D printed shoe deal with Zellerfeld, was a pioneer in the modern era of pivoting from pro sports to business ventures.

After retiring from the NBA in 2012, Davis has branched out into just about everything: Hollywood producing, cannabis, venture capital, and even rapping (he’s good, too!). It’s indeed a bit shocking that it took this long for Davis to get into fashion.

The first sneaker launch from Davis and OverDose is the OD Easy PZ, a $199.00, limited release drop in five color ways. OverDose is categorizing the Easy PZ as a “recovery sneaker,” which is a growing area of the footwear market that targets consumers who are into fitness and are looking for extra comfort in their post-workout hours.

According to Davis, the Eazy PZ’s were designed to embody OverDose’s ‘From Analog to AI’ ethos:

“I came from a time where the game, the culture, and the product were all connected, but ownership wasn’t,” Davis said. “This is about changing that. ‘From Analog to AI’ is about taking everything we grew up on and building it into something new, where creators actually control what they create.”

This aligns perfectly with what Zellerfeld has been building throughout this decade. It also ties in precisely with Davis’s venture capital brand, Business Inside the Game (BIG), which was created expressly to support ‘multi-hyphenates’ like Davis; the BIG website refers to Davis as “the athlete/creator/entrepreneur/investor/founder.”

Indeed, that seems to hit the nail on the head in terms of the value proposition that AM offers for celebrity-backed product launches. Anyone who remembers the fiasco that ensued when the Ball Brothers’ father, LaVar Ball, launched Big Baller Brand back in the 2010s, knows that it’s virtually impossible to stand up an entire sneaker supply chain on your own and have it be competitive, when sneakers are neither your expertise nor your main focus. The same goes for essentially any manufactured good one might try to sell.

By partnering with Zellerfeld, on the other hand, entrepreneurs like Davis can test the waters in the footwear space without having to become full-time sneaker moguls. That also helps capture what’s most lucrative about these types of launches, which is the appeal for consumers interested in limited edition items.

Footwear may be the space where this is most prevalent, currently, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t spread to other product categories, with athletic equipment jumping to mind most immediately. In fact, it will be interesting to see if Davis himself has plans for targeting that market with his BIG platform.

Images courtesy of Zellerfeld/OverDose