Douglas Levere
PostProcess
Daniel J. Hutchinson, left, and Jeff Mize stand with PostProcess products at Buffalo headquarters.
New York-based PostProcess Technologies has announced a $4 million seed round as the company looks to accelerate technology developments and meet growing customer demand.
One of the leading companies in the automation of post-printing, the seed round brought about a number of large backers, including Rand Capital, Richmond Capital Partners, and a range of angel investors around the world. The most significant financial support has come from New York Ventures, making up a quarter of the total funding with a $1 million injection.
New York Ventures is the is the venture capital arm of Empire State Development (ESD), a New York State business resource and innovation investment division. Dedicated to encouraging innovation and fuelling economic growth in communities across the State, New York Ventures has pledged $1m into what it perceives as a burgeoning company in an equally burgeoning industry.
“New York Ventures’ investment into high-tech companies are a key component of our comprehensive strategy to create jobs and grow the economy in Upstate New York,” said Howard Zemsky, ESD President, CEO & Commissioner. “Western New York is once again being recognised for innovative, emerging manufacturing technologies such as 3D printing, and we look forward to PostProcess’ continued success as the company seeks to establish itself as a leader in the industrial additive manufacturing industry.”
Proprietary software, hardware and chemistry will all be addressed with the funding, while the company is also committed to expanding its global Customer Experience Team to meet ‘an exponential growth in demand.’ Last December, Daniel J. Hutchinson, the founder of PostProcess Technologies, revealed the company had a backlog of its automated cleaning systems.
PostProcess Technologies has recently emerged as a company with a potential solution to the challenges of producing customer-ready 3D printed parts at high volume. Coming off the print bed with support structures attached and typically inconsistent surfaces, parts require support removal and surface finishing to ensure they are aesthetically-pleasing and fully operational. Generally, these steps are mostly completed with time-consuming manual processes, which not only limit the volume of parts, but can also damage them.
Hutchinson’s company aims to solve these challenges with automated and intelligent post-printing solutions, saving time and money, increasing throughput, and delivering consistency. PostProcess Technologies’ comprehensive, patented technology, encompasses hardware, software and consumables. So far, the technology has been well-received in the automotive, aerospace, defence, life sciences and consumer industries.
“Additive manufacturing is now being implemented in every imaginable market across a wide variety of applications,” Hutchinson said. “We were intrigued by the complex challenge of solving the finishing requirements across all 3D printer technologies and materials. We are able to deliver unmatched results for our current and future customers through precision energy management, which we achieve through a combination of proprietary software, chemistry and hardware.”
Jeff Mize, Chief Executive Officer, PostProcess Technologies added: “We continue to hear from our customers that the post-processing of parts is becoming the bottleneck in their additive operation as prototype volumes grow into the thousands per year and production volumes grow into the thousands per day. Our technology delivers unparalleled consistency, while showing a return on investment that is often less than six months.”
