"SPAC merger means death" revisited. How the stock market revealed the true face of 3D printing companies.
Two years ago, I wrote that going public through the back door kills additive manufacturing companies. On June 29, 2026, BigRep closed that infamous chapter once and for all.
Just look at this lineup...
Desktop Metal debuted on December 10, 2020 through the merger with Trine Acquisition Corp. A post-transaction equity value of up to $2.5 billion and roughly $580 million in fresh capital. Revenue in its debut year: $16.5 million. Net loss: $90.4 million.
Markforged debuted on July 15, 2021. Merged with the SPAC “one” (NYSE: AONE), sponsored by Kevin Hartz, at a $2.1 billion valuation, bringing in about $361 million in gross proceeds.
Velo3D debuted on September 30, 2021. The merger with JAWS Spitfire Acquisition Corporation, delivered $274 million in net proceeds at a pro forma enterprise value of $1.6 billion.
Shapeways debuted the very same day on September 30, 2021 at a $605 million valuation. The business combination was run through Galileo Acquisition Corp.
Fathom debuted on December 27, 2021 by the combination with Altimar Acquisition Corp. II. The deal announced at a $1.5 billion valuation.
Fast Radius debuted on February 7, 2022 through the merger with ECP Environmental Growth Opportunities Corp.
And finally, BigRep which debuted on July 31, 2024. Merged with SMG Technology Acceleration SE, a SPAC listed in Frankfurt since October 2023. The opening price of €11.20 implied a market capitalization of around €163 million.
Every one of these companies reached the stock market the same way: by merging with a shell company, because none of them qualified for a traditional IPO.
On September 30, 2024, I published an article titled „SPAC merger means death”. My argument was simple: AM companies entering the public markets through the back door were never truly ready for it, and a sudden influx of investor cash would solve none of their structural problems.
That thesis has now been tested over 21 months.
I was right in every single case.
Not one of these companies is still trading where it started. Each of them has either ceased to exist, been absorbed into another, privately held entity, or been rebuilt from scratch on the ruins of the original shareholder base.
Velo3D, the only one back on an exchange today, got there by handing roughly 95% of the company to a creditor and wiping out everyone who bought the story in 2021.
At the end of June, the list finally closed, proving the point once and for all.
BigRep - the last AM company to take this route, announced its delisting and voluntary liquidation, less than two years after ringing the opening bell in Frankfurt.
Below is the full scorecard: who survived, who didn’t, how much it cost shareholders, and why this mechanism could only have ended exactly the way it did.
The Class of 2020-2021
Desktop Metal was first.
Ric Fulop wasn’t selling printers - he was selling the market itself. Investor presentation stated, in black and white, that additive manufacturing would grow from a $12 billion industry in 2019 to $146 billion by 2030.
Today, in mid-2026, the entire market, even under the broadest definition, is worth between $26 billion and $31 billion.
A company generating $16.5 million in annual revenue promised investors a market that never existed and never will.
Everything that followed was simply a long, bumpy descent.
Desktop Metal was struggling with both its finances and its ability to raise additional capital. The acquisition by Stratasys failed, only for the company to be acquired a year later by Nano Dimension.
Nano Dimension completed its acquisition on April 2, 2025, under a court order, for $179.3 million. 117 days later, Desktop Metal filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The liquidation plan was approved by the court on September 30, 2025. The core assets were ultimately sold for roughly $7 million, while subsidiaries such as ExOne, EnvisionTEC, and AIDRO were acquired by Anzu Partners for another $10 million.
A $2.5 billion valuation. 7 million dollars at the finish line.
Desktop Metal remains the most disgraceful symbol of the industry’s excesses - one that will remain with additive manufacturing for years to come.
Shapeways, the creator marketplace once valued at $605 million, shut down overnight on July 3, 2024. The brand, the Eindhoven factory, and the remaining assets were later bought back from the bankruptcy trustee by the founders and the Dutch team.
The company still exists today, only at the scale it should have operated from the very beginning.
Fast Radius went public in February 2022 and filed for bankruptcy just nine months later. An industry record no one wants to break.
Fathom was taken private by CORE Industrial Partners in 2024 and is doing just fine. It operates across 25 manufacturing processes, with 3D printing being only one of them. It survived because it was never a pure-play AM company, and because it left the stock market before the stock market destroyed it.
Markforged: a $2.1 billion valuation in 2021. $70 million in revenue in 2025. Sold for $42.5 million in 2026. All assets ended up in the hands of direct competitor Stratasys. The technology was real. Continuous carbon fiber reinforcement remains one of the company’s genuine engineering achievements. The valuation, however, turned out to be nothing more than a costume.
Velo3D is the only exception on this list.
First quarter of 2026: $13.8 million in revenue, up 48%. Gross margin improved to 17.2%, compared to negative 73.6% a year earlier. Debt cut by 70%. A contract with the Defense Logistics Agency. The stock price up several hundred percent in six months.
Today, the company is finally doing what it should have done all along: metal printing, defense, and a narrow industrial specialization.
In April, it raised another $50 million through a share offering, meaning the public market remains a viable source of capital. The difference is that this time investors are financing a business with a positive gross margin.
Velo3D recovered only after the SPAC nearly killed it, and after a restructuring that erased almost everything contained in the original promise.
The Polish market had its own miniature version of the same phenomenon.
Zortrax entered the market through Corelens. Sygnis did the same through MODE. Formally, these were reverse mergers rather than SPACs, but the mechanism was essentially identical. Both companies remain listed on NewConnect. Both now have only marginal exposure to 3D printing, while Sygnis derives most of its business from drones.
And finally, BigRep, which I covered in details this past Friday.
Why the back door always leads to the same place
A company that cannot enter the stock market through the front door usually cannot do so for one simple reason: it has nothing convincing to present.
A traditional IPO requires financial results, an operating history, and the confidence of institutional investors capable of reading a balance sheet.
None of these companies had the full package. And SPAC allows all of that to be bypassed.
But bypassing the process comes at a price.
The day the merger closes, the company’s product changes. Yesterday it sold machines, materials, and services - today it sells quarterly growth. The machines merely become evidence supporting that story.
Being a public company is expensive, and those costs are fixed.
Auditors, law firms, transaction advisors, investor relations, quarterly and annual reporting. Legal work for every refinancing attempt, every capital raise, every prospectus.
You pay exactly the same whether you sold two machines, twenty, or two hundred that quarter.
A healthy business covers those costs from its operating margins. The SPAC companies on this list covered them with money raised from the stock market, because the market had become their only meaningful source of cash.
To preserve access to that cash, they had to keep the story alive. And to keep the story alive, they had to promise growth.
To promise growth, they had to keep acquiring companies, announcing products, launching new initiatives, and appearing at trade shows.
Which, in every single case, meant spending more and more money without generating a matching increase in machine or service sales. It never stopped until the companies ran out of resources entirely.
So what actually survived?
Go through the list once again and look at what remains.
Shapeways’ machines are still printing in Eindhoven.
Fathom still manufactures in ten production facilities.
ExOne continues operating under Anzu Partners.
Markforged’s technology lives on inside Stratasys.
BigRep’s large-format printers will continue to be built in Berlin.
Every time, the same thing goes into liquidation: the listed company, the former valuation, an investor presentation, a forecasts, and a stock ticker.
If there’s one thing we can learn from all this, it’s this:
Don’t promise investors tenfold growth in a market that’s roughly the size of a single mid-sized automotive supplier.
That is the entire thing. As boring as 3D printing itself.
For an AM company, merging with a SPAC means death. The listed entity dies. The workshop survives. And the bill remains on the table.
Oh, and the people who prepared the investor presentation are never the ones who pay it.