MIT $220M powder metallurgy 3D printing startup (circa 2017)

Tom's skepticism case for 3D printing at automotive cost targets. $10,000/lb baseline vs. $2/lb automotive target; twenty print heads as factor-of-ten improvement still leaves factor-of-500 gap.

Now, it turns out that turbine blade is worth about five or six thousand. But that's because it's got properties that you can't get from 3D printing. So maybe not the best example. But people are talking — well, faculty in this department have raised $220 million for a startup firm that's using powder metallurgy for 3D printing, and they're going to make automotive parts. You've got kind of a little hurdle from $10,000 a pound to something that's automotive, which is going to be selling for on average about $2 a pound. You better have some really good ideas of how to reduce that. So what are they doing? They have multiple print heads. They have like twenty print heads. That could reduce the cost by a factor of ten. Ten into 10,000 and you're down to 1,000. You only need another factor of 500. So what's your next idea?