Google Ventures Leads Massive $100 Million Funding Round of Carbon3D

Carbon3D, which emerged from stealth mode earlier this year to stun us all with news of their remarkable Continuous Liquid Interface Production (CLIP) technology that prints incredibly quickly (a staggering 25-100 times as fast as existing technologies) and in precise detail, is continuing on its snowballing success–this time to the tune of another $100 million in funding.

The company, which in March noted that it had already raised a whopping $41 million in funding via Series A funding with Sequoia Capital and Series B funding with Silver Lake Kraftwerk, followed that success up in April with the announcement of $10 million in investment from Autodesk’s Spark Investment Fund.

Today, Carbon3D, Inc. has announced a successful Series C investment funding round led by Google Ventures, with a cool $100M in further financing. Neither source disclosed the valuation.

Following Carbon3D’s initial presentation they gave a TED conference back in March, Google “started a dialogue,” noted CEO Joseph DeSimone, as the tech giant continues to expand across a broad range of enterprises and areas. The two companies can certainly find common ground as they now grow together, with both Google and Carbon3D inherently invested in the critical nature of algorithms to their businesses. The algorithms used by both lead to more accuracy across the board as they increase in use–in Google’s case, more searches on their namesake search engine lead to better results for searchers, while Carbon3D’s algorithms benefit from continuous data fed from failed prints.

As DeSimone noted, “3D printing is plagued with failures,” but this doesn’t stop them. On the contrary, he explained, information from failures “gets fed back to our algorithm and we learn from our mistakes not to do it again.” The use of algorithms and data helps Carbon3D to improve the calculations used during the print process. Not only found in their own labs, Carbon3D additionally requests print data from willing customers to broaden their pool of data sources.

With Google also invested in data collection and in widening their reach–projects like self-driving cars and drones might spring to mind–it seems a natural fit that the behemoth should lead this investment round.

“Google has broad aspirations. They are doing a lot of things with hardware and prototyping and the ability to support them in that is going to be very cool,” DeSimone said.

Along for the ride with Google Ventures are:

• Yuri Milner, Russian entrepreneur and venture capitalist
• Reinet Fund S.C.A F.I.S.
• Previous investors:
  • Sequoia Capital
  • Silver Lake Kraftwerk
  • Northgate Capital

Carbon3D, now with an impressive $151 million in total funding, will use their raised capital to invest in their operations, including their printer hardware and software, as well as materials used in the CLIP process. The company’s tech is already in use with Ford, which seems to be just the beginning. CLIP technology is intended for use in industries including aerospace, apparel, automotive, dental, electronics, medical, and industrial manufacturing.