3D Printing Start-up Fortify Secures $10M in Series A Funding Led By Accel

Fortify, a Boston-based additive manufacturing start-up and pioneer in digital composite manufacturing (DCM), announced it has closed a $10M Series A funding led by Accel with additional participation from Neotribe, Prelude Ventures and Mainspring Capital Partners. The funding will support the launch of Fortify’s Discovery Partner Program and the growth of the Fortify team. This follows a previous seed round this year of $2.5M.

Fortify’s “Fluxprint” technology combines magnetics and digital light processing (DLP) 3D printing to produce composite parts with optimized mechanical properties. This is achieved by precisely orienting reinforcement fibers throughout the parts. Founded on research in composite 3D printing by Dr. Randall Erb and Dr. Joshua Martin at Northeastern University, applications for their technology can be found in the manufacturing, aerospace and automotive industries among others. With Fortify’s patented hardware and software, users are granted control over fiber alignment throughout each printed part - allowing them to “tune” material properties for specific applications.

“Now more than ever before, it's vital that the U.S. economy has a strong manufacturing ecosystem,” says Eric Wolford, venture partner at Accel. “Fortify is uniquely positioned to help lead the resurgence of American manufacturing by using tech to produce best-in-class parts for the digital age.”

Fortify’s Discovery Partner Program will give select customers early access to the DCM platform. Fortify’s technology focus is initially on injection mold tooling for quick turn, lower volume runs and high performance end use parts. While these applications are not necessarily “new” to industry watchers, early Fortify users are reporting improvements over trials with other 3D printed mold tools. Fortify is supplying molds now to support customer applications and will ship beta machines to select partners in early 2020.

Fortify is exploring end use part applications with industry leaders in electrical connectors, impellers, mixers and specialty drones. These use cases will all benefit from Fortify’s unique ability to tune material properties.

Additionally, Fortify this year introduced the Fortify Fiber Platform, inviting materials companies and resin suppliers such as DSM, BASF and others to develop high-performance resins in conjunction with Fortify material scientists and engineers.

“We’ve achieved so much since our founding, and we’re eager to expand on our platform capabilities,” says Josh Martin, CEO and founder of Fortify. “With the support of our investors, we will focus on innovation, bring our technology to new partners, and grow our product offerings.”

Fortify has experienced growth over the past year, doubling their team and securing new office space to accommodate the expansion. Notable hires include industry veteran Ben Arnold as VP Business Development, most recently of Desktop Metal and Dave Colucci, formerly of Soft Robotics, as their new Embedded Systems Lead Engineer. To support its growth, Fortify will add several additional team members as they relocate over the summer to the Hood office park area in Charlestown.

“Material properties are the dominant factor driving adoption of Additive Manufacturing across industries,'' says Ben Arnold, Fortify VP of Business Development. “Our open materials platform leverages the world’s leading polymer chemists as they continually innovate. We reinforce these base resin with fiber as we print to gain significantly higher levels of performance. It’s quite exciting that even in this early stage of the company, we have customers buying parts for use in production applications.”

In addition to its Series A, Fortify has received multiple accolades, including being named Formnext Startup Challenge winners (2019), Best University Startups 2017 (NCET2), JEC Startup Booster Innovation Award (2017) and MassChallenge Gold Winner (2016).

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.

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