A million square feet of metal AM
VulcanForms, tax incentives, and Michael Kenworthy
Atomic Layer of the Week:
VulcanForms has just made two major moves, and both are bigger than the press release suggests.
First, the company appointed Michael Kenworthy as its Chief Technology Officer - a leader who until recently was building rocket engines at Relativity Space, and before that was responsible for technology at Seurat Technologies and Divergent (among others).
Second, the company secured $21.26 million in tax incentives from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to support a manufacturing facility of up to one million square feet, expected to create 1063 jobs!
In an industry where most “breakthrough” announcements are promises of things yet to be built, this is something real.
Let’s start with the money, because the real story lies in how the incentives work. These tax credits are performance-based. Massachusetts only grants them once the factory is operating and the promised jobs have actually been created.
In this funding round, the state awarded $52 million in tax incentives across 11 projects, with VulcanForms receiving the largest individual allocation.
In return, the participating companies are expected to invest more than $1.4 billion of their own capital and create 2793 jobs.
That is worth remembering, because we’ve heard the phrase “rethinking how products are made” before in this industry. The last company making that promise was Desktop Metal - shortly before filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
The key difference is the market VulcanForms serves: aerospace, defense, and medical manufacturing. These are sectors where certification is part of the product itself, and low-cost competition from Asia carries far less weight because nobody is going to install an uncertified component inside a jet engine.
The new Devens facility will become the company’s third manufacturing site in Massachusetts, joining its existing operations in Devens and Newburyport.
Back in January, VulcanForms raised $220 million in a Series D funding round. The picture that emerges is of a company scaling methodically rather than chasing headline-grabbing leaps.
The company has also strengthened its leadership by bringing in Michael Kenworthy.
He joins from Relativity Space, where he served as Vice President of Engineering. Before that, he was Chief Product Officer at Seurat Technologies. Earlier still, he spent more than six years as CTO at Divergent, where he built and deployed a digital manufacturing system - the very layer that metal additive manufacturing has so often struggled to develop.
His background also includes GE Aviation, Honeywell, and a mechanical engineering degree from MIT.
This is someone who has repeatedly taken complex metal manufacturing processes and turned them into production systems that consistently deliver working parts.
Taken together, VulcanForms can count this as an exceptionally successful week: a substantial performance-based incentive package from the state, a third manufacturing facility, and a CTO with a proven track record of transforming fleets of 3D printers into true production systems.
Companies like VulcanForms are building something more durable than many of the stars of the previous era. Their competitive advantage lies in vertical integration, certifications, and experienced people who have already taken difficult manufacturing operations from concept to production.
There are no guarantees, and the company itself acknowledges that.
But if you’re looking for a place in this industry where the noise of press releases meets genuine manufacturing engineering, this is where you should be looking.
Atomic Layer from the Past:
12 years ago, colorFabb launched sales of 3D printing pellets for FFF technology, targeting hobbyists and DIY enthusiasts who owned home filament extruders like Filabot.
The company offered test kits with four jars of pellets in any color combination, each weighing 1.2 kg.
The move was driven by high filament costs, which discouraged many potential users. Pellets were about twice as cheap as traditional spools. The offer included PLA/PHA, PLA, woodFill, and XT-copolyester.
However, the concept of home filament production never became widespread. Despite widespread praise, few users actually adopted it due to low production efficiency and poor final quality.
Read all:
News & Gossip:
#1
Velo3D, the company that flirted with death back in 2024, is putting up a 288,747-square-foot plant in Livermore, California. 40-plus large-format metal printers at launch, infrastructure for over 100. Fremont keeps R&D, Livermore takes production.
Former head of marketing Katelyn Spuhler is back too, publicly glad to rejoin the team and hinting at more to come. When people return to a company they left, that says more than any press release.
#2
John Kawola, who recently stepped down as CEO of BMF, is joining Harvard’s Office of Technology Development. He’ll help identify early-stage technologies, shape their path to market, and turn research into startups.
One notably candid line from his post: seven years at BMF taught him what to do-and what not to do. In an industry that rarely admits the second part, that honesty is worth more than the title.
#3
AMUG has its new board, effective July 1, 2026.
Dallas Martin (Toyota) takes the presidency, with Daniel Landgraf (3D Spark) as VP, David Leigh (UT Austin) on treasury, and Daniel Braley (V2X) running membership.
The rest of the slate spans Stratasys, Oak Ridge, and GoEngineer, a decent spread across industry, academia, and national labs. Their job now is building the 2027 conference in Atlantic City, March 14-18.
Congratulations!
#4
My dear colleagues from VoxelMatters just announced the new AM market report about polymers. According to Davide Sher it’s worth is $9.45 billion for 2025, up 18.7% year over year. Hardware took the biggest slice at $4.36 billion, ahead of services at $3.21 billion and materials at $1.89 billion.
The dataset is serious: 239 hardware makers, 249 material suppliers, 465 service providers, nearly 200,000 data points.
Most of that growth came from desktop and consumer printing, the corner generalist media buried years ago as a dead fad. Bambu Lab alone matched the top three industrial polymer players combined. APAC overtook North America in hardware and grew fastest on Chinese brands, while North American hardware revenue went essentially flat.
Industrial systems will cycle back as buyers digest earlier capacity, but the shape of the market has changed in plain sight.
The full 2026 Polymer AM Market Report drops July 14 and is open for pre-order now on the VoxelMatters website.
#5
Formnext is launching its first Defence Summit on November 17, 2026, kicking off the Frankfurt show’s main run through November 20.
Organized with AMDefNet, the summit puts industrial 3D printing squarely inside the EU and NATO supply-chain conversation: resilient sourcing, shorter response times, decentralized production.
The panels cover procurement, standardization, cybersecurity, and data. Access is limited to EU and NATO member states, and pre-registration is open at formnext.com/defencesummit.
#6
ASTM’s AM Center of Excellence, working with the UK Ministry of Defence under Project TAMPA, has published a strategic guide for certifying additively manufactured parts in defense, free to download from the AM CoE site.
The core idea is a four-tier classification, Class A through D, that ties the certification evidence you need to how badly a part failing would hurt. Certification is the actual product in defense AM, so it’s nice that’s someone finally wrote it down.