German additive manufacturing post-processing company DyeMansion has closed a $14 million Series B funding round.
Now with total funding at $24 million, the five-year-old company is poised for further expansion.
Starting with its founding in 2015, DyeMansion initially targeted consistent batch dyeing of 3D printed parts. The team took inspiration from an early success in dyeing cell phone cases; while the phone case business didn’t work out, the coloration was intriguing enough for its own business model.
“The idea actually came from our seed investor himself. In the beginning we only wanted to design 3D printed smartphone cases and sell them online. He said that this was the most boring application for 3D printing. But he liked the finish and color that we developed ourselves for the first smartphone cases and said that it would solve a big problem in the industry if we built an automated solution for it,” DyeMansion CEO and Co-Founder Felix Ewald explained to investor btov Partners.
Ensuring consistent coloring is a perhaps surprisingly scientific endeavor, requiring significant lab work to ensure color matching. So DyeMansion developed their DM60 DeepDye Coloring (DDC) equipment to automate effective dyeing.
Today, DyeMansion can match colors on the RAL or Pantone spectrum, and even produce viable neons. They’ve recently introduced the first large-scale coloring solution for HP’s MJF 3D prints as well, going from grey PA12 to colorful PA12.
The company continued to grow, offering additional post-processing solutions and introducing its three-step Print-to-Product workflow for industrial 3D printing. The workflow turns “raw plastic parts into high-value products,” as DyeMansion describes it.
In addition to their DDC technology, DyeMansion also cleans prints (with the Powershot C) and smooths surfaces (via PolyShot surfacing with the Powershot S and via VaporFuse surfacing with the Powerfuse S).
To widen availability, just last month DyeMansion introduced its new post-processing partner platform with 46 partners in production and sales. This allows access to these offerings beyond the 450 machine installations currently in place with 150 hardware customers.
With all this growth, and the ongoing interest in post-processing as additive manufacturing continues to see rising adoption rates, perhaps it’s no wonder that the company has been attracting investment, even in a difficult economic environment. In fact, DyeMansion reports YTD +25% growth over 2019.
In 2018, the company closed a $5M Series A funding round.
Today, they’re announcing their $14M Series B round.
The Series B welcomes back all existing investors — UVC Partners, btov Partners, KGAL, and AM Ventures — and adds Nordic Alpha Partners (NAP) to the investment fold.
“We are super happy to have Nordic Alpha Partners on board for our growth journey. They are a perfect fit for the current phase we are in with DyeMansion. Their unique approach and expertise will help us to further strengthen our position as a global industrial leader. It makes us proud that all our existing investors are continuing with their support as well. This will help us and our customers worldwide to drive the transformation of manufacturing to digital production and the factory of the future,” Ewald says of the new investor.
DyeMansion notes that its plans for the new funding influx include even more focus “to speed up the shift to digital manufacturing in all matters,” detailing:
“On the product side, this means automated, digitally connected and fully integrated process chains. On the organizational side, the funding will further strengthen DyeMansion’s global presence and fulfillment capabilities via new demo facilities, regional application consultants and commercial business infrastructures. The aim: Enabling global accounts, local customers and partners to get started with 3D-printing or move to the next level of serial manufacturing with their application and factories almost anywhere.”
Disclosure: I published a piece with an early exclusive covering this news at Forbes.
Via DyeMansion
