TDK Ventures invests in additive manufacturing space
TDK Corporation (TSE: 6762) announced today that it is partnering with a world leader in additive mass manufacturing with Origin. Origin creates 3-D printers that can print a very wide variety of products not only with unique performance characteristics but also tailored to mass manufacturing.
- San Francisco-based Origin enables advanced materials from its 3D printers for customers in a variety of markets in the industrial, dental, and medical sectors.
- TDK Corporation will provide its extensive experience in mass manufacturing and electronic materials to jointly explore new additive production markets.
Origin’s work with Henkel on producing the highest strength polymers with flame retardant characteristics is a key example of such a unique product with unparalleled performance with 3D printing. “We think of Origin like the Apple of 3-D printers; they own the platform, which is the 3-D printer but their end customers choose which app to build using their platform by choosing their own proprietary material,” said Nicolas Sauvage, Managing Director of TDK Ventures.
“TDK is a unique partner for Origin, with its extensive expertise in mass manufacturing and electronic material components that are in the hundreds of millions in volume,” said Chris Prucha, CEO and Co-founder of Origin. “At Origin, we are focused on producing the highest performance 3D printed products in the world so that our customers’ can leverage a cost-effective, mass-manufactured solution while satisfying their distributed manufacturing goals. With TDK in our partner network, it offers us an opportunity to expand beyond our own current capabilities and explore collaborations in newer 3-D printed electronic structures. Given TDK’s knowledge of electronics and our competency in advanced polymeric and ceramic materials, we believe this partnership will be very fruitful.”
“Origin’s system not only creates unique products with unparalleled performance, accuracy, and cost, but they have also shown that they can deliver end-to-end solutions at an unprecedented speed,” said Nicolas Sauvage, Managing Director, TDK Ventures. “Take their nasopharyngeal swabs for example, in a matter of weeks, Origin went from napkin sketch to producing hundreds of thousands of fully sterilized, FDA compliant, ship-ready, mass production quality products per week, which is invaluable to public safety and sustainability – and currently being used to fulfill the COVID-19 testing shortage in the United States.”
“TDK Ventures focuses on collaborative partnerships with high-growth, material science technology start-ups that are extending the boundaries in deep tech. When Covid-19 hit, some of us wondered what the future of supply chains would look like, which led to our exploration of the 3-D printed mass manufacturing market. When we encountered Origin’s technology and unique business model, we realized a TDK collaboration with Origin would be fruitful for not only exploring new technology areas in 3-D printed electronic materials but also for envisioning what distributed manufacturing might look like in 10 years through the lens of an innovative start-up,” Sauvage added. “We believe that the partnership leveraging Origin’s expertise in additive mass manufacturing and TDK’s expertise in electronics across 100+ factories will lead to cutting-edge, innovative collaborations between our two companies.”
CEO Chris Prucha and CTO Joel Ong started Origin in late 2015 to 3D print customer parts using open source printers, but quickly faced formidable deadlines. The Origin team discovered that the open source 3D printers were unreliable due to hardware and limited software, thus resulting in poor-quality finished materials. From its start, Origin strived to create an additive manufacturing approach with open materials, leveraging the largest materials science companies, flexible and simple software, and modular hardware design. Today, they have strategic partnerships with the largest materials science companies in the world including BASF, Henkel, and DSM, and at the same time deliver the highest quality products in the dental, medical, and industrial sectors.
www.tdk-ventures.com
