Alloy Enterprises raised $26 million in a Series A funding round, bringing their total raised to 37 million. This is heating up the battle between them and various firms such as Vulcan Forms and Seurat to usher in service based 3D Printing at volume. Alloy Enterprises specializes on aluminum and uses LOM. It stacks laser cut layers of aluminum sheet. This limits design freedom but is very low cost. The company says that it has done ten tonne production runs and that it is targeting automotive, industrial and heavy equipment markets. The last one could especially benefit from this process to make parts that were before not made with additive.
Turkish spin out MetalWorm Additive Manufacturing Technologies is launching two WAAM machines. This shows us that competition can not just come from China. The firm is offering steel and will work on armor steel. Indeed MetalWorm has clients including Roketsan, Otokar and FNSS, the last two being armored car manufacturers and the first one an artillery and missile company. WAAM could provide military with novel lower cost better performing composite armor, this could be huge. This is a big step for solidifying Turkey´s manufacturing base around additive, it already has powder bed fusion companies, on the back of the success of its weapons in Ukraine.
Senvol has gotten a US Army Contract “Applying Machine Learning to Ensure Consistency and Verification of Additive Manufacturing (AM) Machine and Part Performance Across Multiple Sites.”