Hyperganic founders Lin Kayser and Michael Gallo have left their roles as CEO and CTO, respectively.
Kayser is understood to have departed on Wednesday March 8th, with Gallo following suit on Thursday March 9th.
The pair have worked together for more than 20 years. An earlier collaborative venture saw them working in the movie industry to bring to market a product targeted for high fidelity film playback. The company, named IRIDAS, was acquired by Adobe in 2011.
Kayser and Gallo left their positions at Adobe circa 2014, with the pair soon in pursuit of a new idea. What started as a casual conversation, soon turned into an incorporated business. Their idea was to facilitate the design of more complex products, with Gallo soon working up a software that would harness artificial intelligence to power a high voxel design engine in a bid to address the tribal knowledge that each designer carries.
By 2017, Hyperganic was founded and Kayser began to present their concept on the design and manufacturing conference circuit. Come 2019, the company had secured a partnership with 3D printer OEM Kumovis, and later began working with EOS to further prove out Hyperganic’s AI-powered software. Hyperganic raised 7.8m USD in Feburary 2021 as it prepared the roll-out of its flagship products, which finally commenced in June 2022. That year, the company also formalised two partnerships with EOS – one to advance space propulsion and the other to focus on air conditioning unit applications – and acquired physical simulation firm DirectFEM. The company later began to showcase a 3D printed aerospike engine design concept developed with its technology at industry trade shows, though adoption of the Hyperganic Core 3 remained slow.
In speaking to TCT in 2021, Kayser conceded that Hyperganic would have to enact a ‘huge shift’ for engineers and businesses to adopt its technology, but he saw big potential in aviation, space, and beyond. “It’s not self-evident that this will succeed,” he told TCT “It’s a crazy amount of work. But if we succeed, it’s really going to make a dent.”
As the founders both step down, it appears that work is for someone else to now take up.
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