Shapeways is moving!
If you hadn’t heard, Shapeways was resurrected after its initial incorporation was shut down some months ago. The company’s original founders then launched a new venture that acquired the assets from the failed original Shapeways, and relaunched most of the services recently.
Since the relaunch, Shapeways has been quite aggressive in rebuilding what will eventually be something even bigger than the original Shapeways. For example, they acquired Thangs, an online 3D model repository, to help reconstruct a method for clients to store and share content, along with other service restorations.
It now seems that all this activity has caused them to outgrow their initial location. Shapeways explains:
“The centric location in Eindhoven is a fantastic location and dear to our hearts with many great memories and learnings. However, with the current growth rate of the company and the planned expansion of our value added services, the location will soon become too small to serve our global industrial and medical clientele.
Therefore in late 2026 we will relocate to a new site at Strijp T, a former Philips Electronics building that is in the midst of being renovated.”
This is a bit ironic, as the company originally launched from a Philips incubator all those years ago. It’s also unsurprising, as most of the buildings in Eindhoven seem to be former Philips facilities.
Shapeways intends on renovating the old industrial building into modern standards, where they will have the space and freedom to expand their services. They write:
“Our new home will have the space and power we need to grow and provide the capacity to operate our machinery and expand the number of technologies and additional services. It will allow us to take and implement the operational learnings from our current Factory into improved set-up and lay-out, increasing the efficiency of our processes.”
This is the most interesting part of the operation to me: they intend on adding new services. But they don’t say what they are, at least not yet.
It’s likely they will be adding new manufacturing services as we’ve seen with other 3D print services. Several of them began by offering 3D printing, but over time added services such as injection molding, CNC milling, sheet metal fabrication, finishing services and more. I would not be surprised if Shapeways did something similar.
Via Shapeways
