Headmade Materials
Metal additive manufacturing company Headmade Materials has announced the completion of a €1.9 million financing round.
The sole investor is the Industrial Technologies Fund of btov Partners, a European venture capital firm set up in 2000 to support digital and industrial technology developers.
Headmade Materials spun out of Würzburg-based research institute SKZ with its Cold Metal Fusion 3D printing technology, which has been designed to enable series production, last year. The company intends to use the €1.9m to scale up its Cold Metal Fusion technology, market the technology and develop its customer base.
Cold Metal Fusion is reliant on Headmade’s feedstock system, which integrates metal powder in a plastic binder matrix to allow metal components to be additively manufactured on existing Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) platforms. The building of parts occurs at temperatures below 80°C to minimise stress within the SLS system as well as reduce wear of the printed component. Once parts are retrieved from the powder cake, they go through debinding and sintering to deliver the final pieces.
Headmade says it can process standard alloys, such as stainless steel 316L and titanium 6AI-4V, and hard and refractory metals, while its feedstock is also said to be compatible with almost any laser-based printer on the market. Harnessing the funding from btov Partners, the company is looking to establish its Cold Metal Fusion technology on the market and help companies to achieve additive production volumes of up to 100,000 parts per year.
“We have been working on the technology for five years and the partnership with btov now gives us the opportunity to accelerate the company’s development and realise our vision of 3D series production,” commented Christian Staudigel, Managing Director of Headmade Materials.
“We see the Cold Metal Fusion technology as a very viable approach for serial production due to the high cost efficiency of the process,” added Robert Gallenberger, partner of the btov Industrial Technologies Fund. “The combination of mechanical part properties known from metal powder injection moulding (MIM) process and considerable process advantages, such as reduced safety requirements due to easier powder handling and higher green part stability, is also significant here.”
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