Quantica, a Berlin-based additive manufacturing (AM) company specializing in multi-material applications, announced that it has closed a €14 million Series A financing round. €10 million has been guaranteed upfront, with the remaining €4 million contingent upon Quantica’s ability to hit certain milestones.
Quantica’s flagship technology is its NovoJet printhead design, which allows users to combine multiple materials for a single application. In particular, the company touts the viability of NovoJet printheads for applications requiring ultra-viscous materials.
Quantica plans to use the Series A funds for a variety of scale-up related objectives, including the industrialization and commercialization of its printheads, as well as the shipment of the company’s first 3D printer — the NovoJet C7 — which is anticipated to be available sometime in Q4 2023. Quantica is currently taking pre-orders on the C7, which the company notes will be an open application development platform, giving customers the ability to cultivate their own multi-material 3D printing inputs.
In a press release about the successful Series A round, Quantica’s CEO, Claus Moseholm, commented, “Our team has been dedicated to developing this groundbreaking technology for several years now, and this funding represents a significant milestone in our journey to change how things are manufactured. We are excited to take our technology to the next level and empower designers, developers, and manufacturers to create better, faster, and more efficiently. With this investment, we are confident that we can continue to drive innovation and growth.”
The most striking immediate potential for the company’s technology clearly lies in dental. Fittingly, according to Quantica, the Series A round was led by “a family office with ties to the dental industry”. I had the opportunity to see examples of Quantica’s capabilities at last year’s RAPID + TCT conference, in Detroit. The best way I can describe the dental models printed via the NovoJet is that they simply looked more authentic and individualized than what competitors had to offer, at least in terms of the many, many other dental models on display at RAPID.
Editor-in-chief of 3DPrint.com, Michael Molitch-Hou, wrote that Quantica was one of “the most exciting compan[ies] presenting” at RAPID + TCT 2022. He also noted that, in contrast to vat polymerization methods, “With inkjetting — and specifically with Quantica’s process — a full denture or model can be produced at once, with varying color tones and levels of flexibility.” As Molitch-Hou went on to conclude, this capability certainly has the potential to change the trajectory of AM materials development in sectors far beyond dental (perhaps most intriguingly, in electronics).
Thus, it wouldn’t not an overstatement to assert that Quantica has a realistic possibility of revolutionizing the materials catalog for a market segment (dental) that has already been quite thoroughly developed, when compared to other AM subdivisions. The crucial takeaway from observing the company’s progress thus far, then: what does Quantica’s technology have the potential to do for the AM market segments that are just getting started?
Images courtesy of Quantica