Digital Alloys Joule Printing process development

Resistive heating of welding wire on a substrate; titanium printed at ~2 kg/hr at ~600 W, ~300 Wh/kg. Argon-purged chamber. MIT-spinout startup, ~25 people, in stealth at time of lecture.

I've been in the 3D printing space for about six years now, on the business development and sales side of things. I was at Stratasys — one of the first major polymer printing companies, developed FDM technology. They acquired a company that developed PolyJet, which is sort of like an inkjet polymer process. Then I was at Carbon, a very well-funded startup in the Bay Area that developed a new liquid-light-based process called DLP, kind of like SLA. For Carbon I led their automotive vertical — all the business development and sales into the automotive industry. And then about a year and a half ago I joined Digital Alloys, a venture-backed startup based in Burlington. Professor Eagar is one of our advisors. A lot of our research team came out of MIT, did their PhDs or postdocs in materials science. We're about two-and-a-half years old. We've received investments from Boeing — everyone knows Boeing — and Lincoln Electric, one of the largest welding technology companies, which also manufactures wire, our feedstock, so that's a strategic investment. We're about twenty-five people now. We're still in stealth mode — we haven't fully commercialized the process yet, but we're pretty open to talking about how it works and the markets that we see as attractive for it.

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