The Innovation: Not an innovation in its 3D printer, but rather what its 3D printer prints; the “House Zero” debuted in 2022. This home in Austin, Texas, is what construction 3D printing company Icon hopes will be an entirely new genre of homes that celebrates their 3D printed bones and promote sustainability. The home is energy efficient; takes less time, labor, and cost to build; and features wall construction that provides thermal insulation and resilience against extreme weather conditions, such as hurricanes. It’s also beautiful and comfortable proving that 3D printed homes are not a compromise of design for function.

The Company: Founded in 2017, Texas-based Icon has the audacious mission to revolutionize homebuilding. Using a construction 3D printer called the Vulcan and concrete-like material of its own design called Lavacrete, Icon has constructed homes across the globe for underserved communities, built barracks for the military, designed potential habitats for on Mars, and ventured into the mainstream housing market with the goal to show how our homes can be built faster, safer, and more sustainably.

The Innovation: The company’s Stargate Factory of the Future – announced in 2021 and set to opened in 2022 – vertically integrates robotics, software, and patented 3D printing technologies to digitize manufacturing of reusable rockets and engines. In addition to the Stargate 3D printers, which are the largest in the world, the factory will also house a metallurgical laboratory, a machine shop, and a mission control center all aimed at launching 3D printed rockets into space. By developing its Factory of the Future and rockets together, Relativity accelerates its ability to improve design, production, quality, and speed.

The Company: Relativity Space is a California-based aerospace manufacturing company founded in 2015 to develop additive manufacturing technologies, launch vehicles, and rocket engines for commercial orbital launch services. By using a giant proprietary 3D printer, called Stargate, company produces fully reusable rockets in just 60 days compared to years for traditional aerospace companies. The first test launch of its Terran 1 rocket is scheduled for 2022.

The Innovation: Axial3D has created a cloud-based service that enables surgeons and other healthcare professionals to upload patients’ 2D scans to a portal with proprietary technology to automatically segment images and create 3D printable files. Doctors can then 3D print these models (or send them to a 3D printing service) to produce visual aids that improve surgery planning and patient education. Axial3D continues to raise significant growth funding to expand its business beyond the surgeons in nearly 30 countries to whom it currently provides models.

The Company: Founded in 2014, Belfast-based Axial3D‘s mission is to improve surgery for everyone globally through 3D scans and 3D printing patient-specific models that make diagnosis and treatment more accurate and customized to the individual. Axial3D offers its portal and 3D printing as a service to healthcare professionals worldwide.

The Innovation: Launched in early 2022, Fluicell’s Biopixlar AER is a single-cell 3D bioprinter that enables users to create detailed biological tissues with high precision. It is the world’s first microfluidic high-precision bioprinter compact enough to fits inside a standard biosafety cabinet, which expands the technology to new customer segments in the rapidly accelerating life science, pharmacological, and medical research sector. This combination of compactness, ease-of-use, remote control, proprietary software, and portability makes it flexible enough for a wide range of applications ranging from aerospace to deep-sea exploration.

The Company: Founded in 2012 as a spin-off from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, Fluicell is a public biotech company specializing in high-resolution 3D bioprinting and single-cell biology. The company is a pioneer in open-volume 3D microfluidics for processing and studying drug effects in single cells at a unique level of detail. Fluicell is also developing advanced therapeutics based on Biopixlar-printed transplantable biocomposites. The company operates in three therapeutic areas where the underlying cause of disease is tissue damage.

The Innovation: California-based metal 3D printing technology company, Velo3D offers the patented Sapphire system, which changes the way products in aerospace, energy, power, and other critical industrial segments are designed and produced. In 2022 the company added support for copper 3D printing and expanded its reach to Europe. More than a metal 3D printer, Sapphire is an end-to-end manufacturing solution that includes software and quality control features that enable companies, such as SpaceX, Launcher, Honeywell, and Honda, to reimagine their metal components and remove the constraints of traditional manufacturing on what can be brought to market.

The Company: Founded in 2014, Velo3D offers metal 3D printing solution that unlocks a wide breadth of design freedom and enables customers to build previously impossible to manufacture products. The end-to-end solution delivers additive manufacturing with the ability to drive humanity’s ambitions in space, make economical supersonic flight a reality, and bring a new level of efficiency and scalability to the energy and manufacturing sector.

The Innovation: Nexa3D will more than double its hardware portfolio in 2022 bringing to market two 3D printers so far in 2022, with a third (the powder bed QLS 820) expected later this year. The machines vastly expand the manufacturing sector’s access to high-speed 3D printing. The company’s proprietary Lubricant Sublayer Photo-curing (LSPc) technology is a key feature in both the NXE 200 3D printer and the XiP desktop resin 3D printer, which features print speed up to 18 cm per hour. With these faster machines, designers, engineers, and manufacturers have access to accurate and affordable prototyping and manufacturing solutions that enable their product innovation.

The Company: Nexa3D is a California-based manufacturer of ultrafast 3D printers for industrial applications that aims to digitize the world’s supply chain sustainably by making the world’s fastest industrial polymer 3D printers accessible to professionals and businesses of all sizes. The company’s groundbreaking technology is shattering traditional 3D printing productivity barriers and opening the aperture of additive materials to disrupt injection molding markets.

The Innovation: 3D printer, materials, and software maker Formlabs continued to push the envelope of machine efficiency in 2022 by reengineering their already market-leading Form 3 and 3B resin printers. The new Form 3+ and Form 3B+ are 40% faster than earlier models because of software developments, higher-intensity lasers, and new patented material settings to optimize laser exposure. The company made the innovations reverse-applicable, so owners of previous models can gain the same efficiencies without purchasing a new machine. The company also launched an electrostatic discharge resin in 2022, one of the industry’s only static-dissipative resin materials which vastly expands applications for resin 3D printing in electronics.

The Company: Massachusetts-based Formlabs was founded in 2011 with the aim of expanding access to digital fabrication, so anyone can make anything. Formlabs is the professional 3D printer of choice for engineers, designers, manufacturers, and decision makers around the globe providing the factories of tomorrow with the flexibility and versatility needed for demanding, evolving industrial applications. Formlabs also develops its own suite of high-performance materials that continue to push the boundaries for 3D printing, as well as best-in-class 3D printing software.

The Innovation: WAAM3D’s launch of the RoboWAAM large-scale industrial metal 3D printer in 2022 marks a ground-breaking advancement in wire arc additive manufacturing set to make the technology more accessible and reliable. Driven by proprietary software to manage slicing and trajectory strategies with material-specific algorithms, the printer’s all-encompassing operating system delivers an environment for monitoring, control, and ease of use set to expand the technology’s reach into heavy industry, marine, construction, and mining at a time when these sectors are significantly hampered by supply chain disruption.

The Company: UK-based WAAM3D was founded in 2018 and grew out of research being conducted a Cranfield University. The company aims to deliver an economically feasible way of 3D printing massive, complex metal designs at entirely new speeds with less waste, challenging traditionally established processes, such as subtractive manufacturing and metal casting.

The Innovation: Although not yet commercially available, BCN3D’s VLM (Viscous Lithography Manufacturing) is heralded as a significant leap forward in resin-based 3D printing. The patented lithography-based 3D printing process laminates thin layers of high viscosity resins onto a transparent transfer film to produce high-performance parts extremely quickly and in an affordable and scalable way. VLM’s signature advancements is its ability to usher in entirely new categories of resin materials and enable multi-material parts. VLM gives material engineers the freedom to formulate resins and modifiers to achieve new thermal and mechanical properties.

The Company: Founded in 2019, Spanish company BCN3D Technologies began as a division of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia with the aim to change the traditional manufacturing status quo by providing reliable, versatile, and productive 3D printers and advanced-manufacturing materials.

The Innovation: With four 3D printers introduced in the last 12 months (RMF500, MetalFuse, Pro3 Series, E2CF), Raise3D continues its push to democratize 3D printing with affordable, easy-to-use solutions that meet today’s manufacturers’ quality demands. By building upon its expertise in FDM 3D printing technology and responding to customer demand, Raise3D expanded to offer 3D printers for high-performance engineering-grade materials, carbon-fiber, and metal filament. Raise3D also introduced a smart assistant to its latest Pro3 Series called EVE, which is preloaded with common printing problems and corresponding solutions. The digital assistant guides users with diagnosing and resolving issues that may affect the quality of the build, while also analyzing the system and sending users reminders to maintain the printer.

The Company: California-based Raise3D was founded in 2014 to design and manufacture 3D printers and additive manufacturing solutions for enterprises of all sizes. Its line of desktop and industrial grade 3D printers span a wide range of materials (polymers, composites, and metal), build volumes, and applications all designed to inspire industry-level change in rapid prototyping and manufacturing.