ROBOZE Buys Dimanex Assets to Build “Physical AI” Platform

Dutch firm Dimanex got its start as an MRO platform for the railways. The company had a contract with the Dutch Army in 2018, and later that year signed one with the Dutch national railway, NS. The cloud-based tool aimed to streamline MRO and give companies a digital supply chain solution. The company also offered 3D printing through partners, along with tracking and part testing. The vision was spot on and is now being used to great effect by Immensa, Würth, Replique, and Pelagus. The company also got in early, helping large organizations get started on their 3D printing journey. Later, it partnered with AMC Bridge for integration into digital warehousing and enterprise IT. That too is what people increasingly want. Then the company introduced AI analytics for supply chain optimization in 2024. Timely for sure.

But, somehow, having the right vision, story, and features that people need is not enough. Somehow, having reputable, large customers at the right time wasn’t enough either. The company that spoke for years about “future-proofing your supply chain” forgot to future-proof itself. Dimanex went bankrupt in February. What happened? We know that finding the right customers and closing deals with them is a big challenge for companies that essentially make 3D printing infrastructure. Large firms know that this is a piece of infrastructure that they are essentially tied to. What’s more, the people buying it will have their career success tied to it, and their direct colleagues will have to use this tool every day. So sales cycles are long, and these firms will always struggle to find enough customers to sustain themselves. Once they have a client, recurring payments will continue forever.

So excellent sales and account management are key. And having a product that is simple to adopt and scrap on the side is a key way to get into accounts. Or a company can do proof-of-concept studies well. Execution on getting these accounts in is key, therefore. And it helps if you´re a big brand that everyone knows, so that you can find customers at the right time. 3Yourmind, for example, was inescapable for many years at shows and in the press. Too late, and the customer will have bodged something together themselves, which they’re attached to like a bad wart. Too early and you’ll scare them off. So branding in this application matters. And whereas for others it’s easy to know which companies may need your services, it’s hard to do this for these infrastructure companies.

Dimanex owes creditors over $2 million and the government over $140,000. And it has been slowing down its activities for years. According to the bankruptcy filings, the firm’s growth slowed during the pandemic and didn’t recover. Money was borrowed to finance growth, but the resulting revenue was insufficient to cover the financing costs. The company subsequently was not able to find new investors. Management then left the firm, leaving it without official executives; it eventually went bankrupt. Dimanex’s bankruptcy should have been handled by management with greater care and forthrightness. Rather than tackle the issue of long sales cycles directly and make its products easier to buy and try, the firm persisted with the old way. A structural problem was therefore ignored. The financing they then turned to seems to have been ruinous for them. It seems like the bankruptcy may have nothing to do with 3D printing at all.

The firm’s assets have now been acquired by high-temperature material extrusion OEM ROBOZE, which plans to use this acquisition to make a “fully interconnected, intelligent manufacturing ecosystem powered by Physical AI.” The Dimanex software will become a part of the Pandora and SlizeR packages that ROBOZE already offers.

ROBOZEs CEO Alessio Lorusso said,

“We are moving beyond standalone machines into intelligent, connected manufacturing system.This acquisition brings physical AI into production environments, where machines learn, adapt and operate as part of a global network. The result is a more resilient and efficient manufacturing system with reduced dependence on centralized hubs to deliver critical components with speed and at scale. Roboze is tackling systemic challenges in the industrial base like long lead times and physical inventory constraints. We are connecting the physical and digital worlds of manufacturing, from the identification of a part in a warehouse, to its qualification, to its production anywhere in the world, this entire process becomes intelligent, automated and interconnected.”

The company hopes it will allow for the optimization of settings, sharing manufacturing data between sites, cloud-based setting changes, and generally digital warehousing. The company hopes that it will enable its clients to implement digital warehousing and create the digital supply chain solutions their customers need.

I’m intensely skeptical of any kind of physical AI mentions and of using AI in manufacturing. Sure, for things like QA and pattern recognition-centric use, it can be amazing for making sense of a lot of data. For settings divination, it could also be an asset, but I’m wary of using it in files and end-use parts. I do think the platform can be an asset to ROBOZE customers and let people roll out services with multiple ROBOZE printers more quickly. If the software united lots of disparate printers, workflows, and files, it could be a real asset to customers as well. It could also be an argument for buying a ROBOZE. And for defense applications, if ROBOZE made it easy to add other people’s machines and files to the platform, it could speed up sales for the manufacturer. Although I’m generally rather skeptical of this whole Physical AI thing, we shall see.

Images courtesy of ROBOZE