UNIZ’s first product launch, the SLASH resin-based 3D printer concludes today, and they blew the doors off their goals. But is there more to the story?
UNIZ, if you haven’t heard, is a spectacular startup that has a very speedy resin-based 3D printing technology. Their process involves using a cool LCD panel to illuminate the resin instead of lasers. This avoids the degradation and stickiness of print layers to the resin tank that occurs in almost every other resin-based 3D printer.
The result of this approach is that printing can take place much faster, as we described earlier (with video). Supposedly, the SLASH can deposit as much as 50x more material in the same time as many other resin 3D printers.
Clearly, this is a very attractive feature, as UNIZ’s Kickstarter campaign ended today with well over 5X their modest funding goal of only USD$50,000. With a half million at their disposal, they should be able to produce the necessary 450 or so units sold.
But one competitor they should be wary of is Carbon, who recently announced their resin-based 3D printer, which also is very speedy – but uses an entirely different method to achieve rapid printing.
I say wary, because Carbon is extremely well funded. And when I say “extremely”, I mean EXTREMELY. That company has received three rounds of investor funding totaling a ridiculous USD$141M, some 280 times larger than UNIZ’s launch.
With this funding, Carbon can easily out-market almost anyone in the 3D printing space. They’ll get to many customers and make the sale before UNIZ and other competitors can. And Carbon will be able to sustain a huge marketing push, because their machine brings in far more revenue than other high-speed resin 3D printers can do.
I understand that UNIZ has some amount of private funding, but it certainly will be nowhere near Carbon-levels.
On the other hand, if you’re aware of the situation and need a high-speed resin 3D printer, it may be that UNIZ’s SLASH is what you need.
Via UNIZ and Kickstarter
