"If you visited us, what you'd be able to feel in the air is we are frantically transitioning from development to full rate production," says Beehive Chief Product Officer Gordie Follin just a few weeks after his company has placed the biggest publicly-disclosed single order of EOS 3D printers in history. The intent of that investment, made up of 30 EOS M4 ONYX metal powder bed machines, is no small undertaking. "We're going from making an engine a week to five engines a week to 20 engines a week and more."
That engine is the Frenzy, Beehive's ace in the modern defence arsenal. It is a family of 3D printed jet engines designed for swarm-class uncrewed aerial vehicles, which can be built much faster and at a much lower cost than traditional systems. Follin says Beehive is currently "in the middle of that transition," taking production from its current output of double digits and into the hundreds. "Next year, we're going to make 10 times that. And then the next year, we might make another two or three times that."
Beehive Industries was quietly established in 2020 by Mohammad Ehteshami, a GE veteran who'd spent his career working on some of the world's most advanced jet engines. After serving as Head of Engineering at GE Aviation, in 2016 Ehteshami was tapped to lead GE's then burgeoning additive manufacturing business, a technology he'd once remarked had given him an "epiphany of disruption" and saw GE investing over $1 billion in powder bed and electron beam processes. Ehteshami retired from GE in 2019, but it wouldn't be too long before he'd set his sights on something new, applying knowledge earned across 40 years in aerospace and additive to solve the problem of speed for U.S. defence. Follin, meanwhile, after spending decades in the propulsion industry working with some of the biggest Fortune 500 companies in the space, including GE Aerospace, took a leap of faith to join a fledgling defence start-up. In 2021, he became Beehive's propulsion employee number one. Together with a small team of engineers, they picked an engine – a 500-pound thrust class engine – and set out talking to potential customers.
