Freeform raises $67M Series B led by Linz Capital with Nvidia, Founders Fund, and Two Sigma for advanced laser metal printing

We have Eric from Free Form joining in just a few minutes, but in the meantime, we can talk about friend of the show. Well, he sounds like he's here. Um, so we are going to bring in Eric from Free Form. He's been on the show before. Welcome back.

How you doing, Eric? Hey guys. Yeah, good to see you guys.

Very cool background. Uh, kick us off with an explanation.

These are all squat racks that we're seeing, right?

Yeah. These are just fancy looking things. You know, they don't really do anything. Uh, what you're looking at behind us is our next generation uh manufacturing platform we call Skyfall.

Um, it'll be the fastest and most automated laser melting platform on the planet. I think last time we talked Yeah.

we had talked about how we were getting ready to design and build this and now we're almost done building it.

Yeah. Amazing. Uh what else happened? There's some news.

Oh.

Oh man, lots of new lots of amazing news. We just closed uh a big series B $67 million.

You know, we're we're

we got to hit the dog.

Amazing.

Amazing. We've talked about getting a dog in the office, too. I love it.

You should. We know. We know we know we know the finest gongs manufacturers in the country. So happy to give a reference.

Yeah, we'll have to get a you'll have to pass those along to us.

We uh it was yeah led by a pandeon uh Michael Lind of Lind Capital uh Nvidia participated Founders Fund, Threshold, Two Sigma Ventures. We've got an amazing cap table of investors

with deep expertise in in the uh operational scaling and deep tech space. It's been great.

Amazing. Where's the biggest uh source of customer growth coming from? Like where what products are actually getting made at least that you can talk about?

Yeah, for sure. Um I would say there's growth across a lot of different sectors.

You know, we're uh demand has outpaced capacity uh which is amazing and we're building a substantial back backlog.

Uh yeah, it's it's been it's been fantastic. Uh obviously, you know, there are a lot of critical industries out there. you know the geopolitical climates uh of the world today where flexible manufacturing is becoming much more more and more important shorting shortening iteration cycles being able to scale up quickly these things are just super important in that space uh and then you know you're just seeing I think this you know the the the advancements in AI are are driving um you know advances in engineering in design in access to information that is accelerating product design which then people you know want to build faster and scale faster. So there's all these kind of forces that are driving advancement in all sorts of different industries where or problems that they're these industries are looking to advance manufacturing technologies to solve.

Talk about uh aerospace or or or maybe uh building airplanes generally. Uh, I imagine that we're not using free form to make the fuselage, but are we talking about like, you know, the seat belt buckles or, uh, blades inside of a jet engine? Like, at what at what scale are we operating here?

Yeah, for sure. Great question. Um, no, we're not making the fuselages. I think,

uh, you know, we're not a hammer looking for a nail.

Sure.

Um,

or a hammer looking for a face.

That's right. That's right. uh the you know we're generally talking about parts that are of the scale you know the the platform behind us is roughly 600 mm x 600 mm by a meter tall

so something that can fit into that envelope obviously we can make extremely high precision things we can make them out of virtually any material any metal

um and and you know intricate features big big features small features we can do just about anything

any metal you know what I'm thinking thinking coffee maker made purely out of lead.

Leadbased coffee maker.

Yeah, there's a very viral coffee maker trying to be free of plastics. And so, John,

I mean, a lead based coffee maker would be free of plastic.

Yeah, clearly not.

It wouldn't have any plastic.

No, no problem.

No problem.

Yeah.

Uh, how much have you scaled up the team since we last chatted? Where where where's that going?

Yeah, it's fantastic. And I want to add on to my answer to your last question, too. We're flying um mission critical parts on multiple Frontier programs today. We're at we are shipping out of the factory many hundreds of parts per month that are going on, you know, very important uh uh uh vehicles and and systems.

Cool.

Um so to the team question, uh we're about 60 people, 55 60 people now. So I think when we spoke last we were maybe 35

40ish. Um, and we're trying to hire about 100 people over the next, you know, 12 months.

Wow.

So, you know, we are

And where where are those jobs going to be? Where are those jobs going to be based? All in the same place or are you actually expanding?

Here in Hawthorne.

Cool.

Amazing.

Yeah. For now. Yep.

Very great.

Maybe. Uh, on the on the part side, like what what's the what uh tons of demand, but where why are customers actually choosing you guys? Is there kind of a speed up around kind of like order timelines, things like that? Like where where uh what's making customers the most happy?

Yeah, I think you know, honestly, we've cracked the code. I mean, the the world the the

here for cracking codes.

We love cracking.

When we when we when we talked before, um it's just interesting, you know, how far we've come in in a relatively short period of time. uh you know I think the rigidity and inflexibility of manufacturing traditional manufacturing systems uh is just no longer acceptable and you you've got this massive advancement in the digital world that's occurring these transformations that are happening and the way we make stuff hasn't really changed in in decades not not fundamentally

and so you know I think customers are looking to design more and more advanced things. They're looking to control physics in new and different ways. You know, you can I saw over my my decade plus at SpaceX, you can design, you know, the most advanced things, but the real problem is when you go to make it. Yeah.

And you know, closing this gap is becoming really important. And you know, what do companies want to do? They want to focus on what they're good at. And the code we've cracked is that we we are the most successful and fastest growing company in the advanced manufacturing space that leverages printing ever. And because we have developed uh we we've solved all of the major problems that were fundamentally preventing the technology from being scalable.

And so that's you know we're no longer in the proof of concept phase where we're proving you know the the theory of it. We are this capital is being deployed to massively expand capacity to meet the the demand that is we're building backlog and is continuing to accelerate.

Amazing.

Last question for me. What's the biggest lesson that you learned from SpaceX that you find useful applying today?

Oh man, I I think you asked me a similar question last time. There's so many lessons. I'm so fortunate to have had such a an amazing experience.

But maybe a different answer now. Maybe a different answer now than when we last chatted. You know, you've the the codes have been cracked.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think that what comes to mind is, you know, the the relentless uh pursuit of the thing that you know is possible. You just you have to fundamentally believe in what you're doing. It has to be based on you know first principles like this is a possible thing and then I am just we are going to relentlessly pursue it until we get it across the finish line and I think that's why we've been so successful here you know combined with the willingness to it's not about how hard something is or if I know how to do it or I don't.

If I if I don't know how to do it but it needs to be done I've got to figure it out. And we're so vertically integrated across everything we do from software to machine learning to advanced compute to electronics to the physical platforms that we build ourselves that this is something I don't think there's any other company out there that is like us on on this front. We don't use third party products at all. Nowhere in the stack top top to bottom.

Crazy.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on the

progress. Congrats to the whole team on all the all the progress. I love to hear that you guys are shipping parts

in Southern California. Let's go.

I I like the the Hawthorne Gardinia Gundo Serious

Long Beach rivalry on just who can produce the most mass for the world is is fantastic.

Yeah. Well, have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.