Lukas Czinger explains how Divergent's AI-driven 3D-printing system is reinventing manufacturing for autos, aerospace, and defense

coming in to the studio uh from Divergent 3D talking about uh manufacturing plans. They have a very cool partnership with Palanteer and I wanted to talk to Lucas. So, welcome to the studio. How are you doing? Doing great. How are you gentlemen? We're great. What's going on? What do we have uh in front of us?

So, you're looking at the airframe for an autonomous aircraft system. So, about a 6 foot long fully autonomous 3D printed structure. And if you look in the tail and on inside you see a little bit about divergent which is full functional integration of these airframes to make them faster, better and cheaper. Wow. Okay.

It looks very cool. And the background is obviously green screen, right? That is our factory. That is Torrance, Los Angeles for you. So one of four buildings on this campus. This is where we manufacture uh at volume for aerospace and defense and the auto industry. Very very cool. Awesome. Um, yeah.

What what who are some of your customers? I know you have a partnership with Palunteer. Now, can you explain uh kind of the business in in in kind of basic terms and then we'll kind of work through it. Yeah, absolutely. Uh customers are really OEMs, so really top automakers like Ferrari, McLaren, Bugatti.

Uh and then primary focus is aerospace and defense. Uh which are really all the large primes. Lohee Martin, Rathon, General Atomics and others.

uh and the smaller uh upandcomers and the larger upandcomers like uh the Andres of the world and Castellians are also uh customers of divergent and what we have built over the last decade is a groundup platform for engineering and manufacturing. So I want to be very clear this was a deep tech startup.

It required over a billion dollars to build uh the system. We've got over 750 patents on it. uh it's not just uh uh a quick manufactur and play rollup strategy. This is really about creating a design differentiation in terms of how quickly you can create performant CAD call it an airframe the CAD for an airframe.

Can you do that in a week instead of a year and a half? And then how do you manufacture what you've created? And we've created both the source code for that design engine.

Then we've created a manufacturing process that stitches together our own version of added manufacturing 3D metal printing and robotic fixturous assembly which allows us to do something uh extraordinary which is have a factory which is product agnostic.

So you're looking at a installed factory base that can go from making an airframe for a Loheed Martin to a large unmanned aircraft system for Rathon to a production vehicle chassis for Ferrari backto backto back with no hardware change whatsoever. And that is a new principle.

That is a new reality where you are combining cost productivity of mass manufacturing, industrial manufacturing with the flexibility of what was first thought of as FRA fast prototyping. Uh really taking those two principles into one system. That's a divergent system.

Uh we've now scaled to over 18 uh contracts really all heading towards programs of record. And to be clear, we're not a prime ourselves. We are a subcontractor to these primes.

What we are building is the manufacturing layer and the engineering layer that all of these programs really require to hit the scale that the US needs to compete uh with our adversaries and to create the deterrence that we need in terms of our inventories and our capabilities.

Yeah, we've talked to a couple people about this this transition from additive manufacturing from a test environment to actual production.

Uh, does that mean that like traditional subtractive man manufacturing doesn't play a role in the in the parts or or or airframes that you design or do you work with other subcontractors to bring in more traditional workflows to augment what you're actually making so that you're just kind of using the right tool for the job at any moment or or is there some benefit to being like a pure play in in additive manufacturing?

Yeah, I'd say that the realities of additive manufacturing cost have changed dramatically. uh when we started 8 years ago uh you were not cost productive in the additive space. Today we're actually cheaper than the caster machined alternative.

So yes, you're able to make these very advanced geometries, but you're actually coming in at a dollar per kilogram point that is more affordable for the prime, the taxpayer, the government uh than the traditional alternative.

Where we see the most value is when we can take design authority for the entire say endtoend missile structure. Start with the requirements. What is the CFD? What are the load cases? Where are the hard points to the other subsystems? Then engineer that from scratch.

That's where we can use high performance computing generative design and essentially optimize across all variables in one cohesive full design package and that then becomes a 100% additive structure that is assembled with that robotic system. Um, are there other systems that end up in these vehicles? Yes.

But you're talking electronics, you're talking the payload itself, you're talking about the turbo jet or the propulsion source. Uh, typically when we're looking at structure, we're 100% additive and we're able to outperform anything that would be cast or machined from a performance standpoint.

Say 30% lighter while meeting requirements, but more importantly, in a lot of cases, 30% cheaper while being able to make a,000 or 10,000 per year. To give you some context, one of our 3D printers can manufacture about 400 large scale munition casings per year.

So imagine a 100 printers running, you're able to do 40,000 munitions per year. And a 100 printers running is not um a unrealistic installed base. We're running tens of machines already today. And that is what the US government also sees as critical for the US.

Can we create a civil reserve manufacturing network, a connected set of next generation facilities that can create these munitions at volume?

Because to cut it very very clear, you look at our legacy programs like Tomahawk, JASM, they're not able to hit the rates that are required by our war fighters, by our leaders, by individuals like Admiral Kapara who are closest to the problem. And why are they not able to hit those rates?

Partially because they cannot get the structure. they cannot get the castings at the volumes required at the quality point at the geometry that's required. We come in and we solve that in a very dramatic way.

Can you talk to me about some of the the history and kind of developmental breakthroughs in additive manufacturing?

I'm sure there's some stuff that's happened just in the industry broadly, maybe even academic papers or different pieces of the supply chain that have kind of unlocked what you're doing at allowed it to scale.

stuff like what what's going on in the alloy space and and uh or or deeper in the supply chain with parts that go into machines or machines that you're able to buy. Now, uh give me kind of the lay of the land because it feels like we're we're we're in a kind of Moore's law moment for this particular technology.

You've obviously built a huge business around it, but what else is driving that upstream? Oh, absolutely. Uh added manufacturing, it's no secret now that it's going to be supporting the structures in our programs of record. And a decade ago it was thought of more as an R&D technology.

So the the industry has moved with us on that. Uh at the same time divergent is very differentiated in the cost productivity. Uh we've built our own 3D printer. So we use our own machine. We built our own material.

So the aluminum alloys, the refractory alloys that we print with uh those are designed by our material scientists. The machine is designed uh by our engineers and we actually integrate that machine in house. So we build it inhouse with a US-based supply chain.

that machine is 10x the cost productivity of its nearest peer. So even though the industry has moved forward as well, Divergent has led a lot of that movement forward and now it is printing on a machine that is able to be 3x the rate while being a third of the cost.

So a 10x improvement to its near pure in terms of talking about some of the advancements. When we started we were printing on single laser systems. So you're talking about powder bed fusion. You've got a powdered metallic on the bottom of the build chamber. got a laser overhead.

You're going to melt one layer at a time of this part and build it like a layer cake. We're now at a 12 laser system. So, we've gone from one laser to 12. We're under 1 kilowatt uh per laser. Now, we're north of 2 and a half kilowatts per laser.

So the amount of energy in this system, the size of the build chamber, the layer height, the speed of our recoding, the speed of our gas flow across that chamber, our automated build plate loading and unloading has essentially multiplied the rate uh by more than 20x over the last eight years.

You guys uh developed your own hypercar. what what would be the right time for us to start exploring de developing a TBPN hyperar given that you just went through the process yourself? You know, if you have a dream and and you've got the capital, pick up the phone, call us and and we can help with it.

Uh that that's what I'll say. But uh Zinger Vehicles and in a more serious note, uh really that was about creating a product to create the ultimate tools and then we created a business out of it.

But early on we said if we're going to make the best design software, the best materials, the best 3D printer, a real assembly system, you have to create a product and you have to test that product tens if not hundreds of times. Uh, and how else are you going to do that? You're not going to do that with a customer.

You're not going to get your iteration. You're not going to get uh the feedback loop fast enough. We had to print thousands of parts and essentially get it wrong for our first two, three years before we really started to get it right.

And then Zinger gave us the systems engineering knowledge, the road data, the branding ability of our own product, taught us about heat exchange, taught us about propulsion. We developed that V8 engine from scratch. We print a lot of that V8 engine, California carb emissions compliant, fully crashcertified.

Uh that vehicle is tremendous feedback into the divergent tools and now in its own right, it's become a brand. It's the only vertically integrated hypercar uh OEM in America. And we just delivered our first handful of cars. Uh they're the fastest roadleal car in the world now.

Um and there's a reason for that is because it's built on a new technology. It is a different chassis that is in that vehicle than any other vehicle on the road. Did you get any angry calls from some of your customers for just absolutely mogging them?

He's like, "Hey, we've been doing this for coming up on 100 years, and uh we're excited to be a customer, but like we would appreciate if you didn't just outperform us on every possible level and do it with a fraction of the budget and the talent and the time. " Hey, it it's motivation, right?

You take that car to the track and you know who you're running against and the engineers are there and they see that and then they go to their executives and they say, "We got to use Divergent to engineer the chassis and manufacture the parts. We got to do it or we're not going to be competitive. " Yep.

And at the same time, we we love competition and so do they. You know, our chief commercial officer, George Biggs, used to be the the head of sales and marketing at McLaren, right?

So, people are clearly betting on uh Zinger Vehicles as the upandcomer in the hypercar space that can truly become the performance car company uh in the US. But to us, competition is a good thing. We're not shy about it. We like to show our customers what can be done.

And even if they are uh you know see the competition in it, at the end of the day they want to make the best product. And if you're giving them the best pricing and the best ability to make that great product, they're going to want to be your customer. You guys might be the most real hard tech company of all time.

Not not like you're being like, oh, we we simultaneously are working with like some of the biggest most important companies in the world from luxury automotive to defense and then we also on the side for fun and just We made a real hyper car that you can actually drive and take on the track.

Um, yeah, the the the car itself looks like it's just like a concept car. It's it's the kind of thing that other manufacturers will put out as a concept car and then fans will see and they'll be like, "Well, this thing's never going to exist, so I'm not even going to be that excited about it.

" I clearly a no render respector. Yeah. Just just we're we're going to make it. No, it it's a it's a tremendous design and the truth of that vehicle is it represents those 750 patents.

Everything about it, the way it's packaged, the way it's engineered, its power density, its seating layout, its aero philosophy, um all those differences come from the technology it utilizes uh as well. That's amazing. Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on. We would love to have you back. We could go way deeper here.

This was great. Uh to be clear, we've got a lot of space on the studio. If you want to park one of those cars, you need a parking spot. We got It's gated. We got security. It'll be safe. We're happy to keep it here in the background. Come to sunny Los Angeles and and go for We're here. We're here.

Oh, you're here to come down here. Drive it over. All right, we will bring it over. And you got to come see the factory as well. Come see missiles and and various structures. That sounds fantastic. Thank you so much for having on, Lucas. This was fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Bye.

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