Voodoo Manufacturing

Description

"Julia" :

"What if 3D printing could replace the factory altogether? That seems to be the question on the minds of Max Friefeld, Jonathan Schwartz, and Oliver Ortlieb. The three friends, roommates, and ex-employees of Makerbot have just secured $1.4 million in funding for their new 3D printing company, Voodoo Manufacturing, whose unique setup offers a serious alternative to traditional factory production.

Voodoo is not your typical Brooklyn-based startup. By connecting hundreds of FDM printers together, the trio have created a working botfarm, a “new-age robotic factory” that, according to the company's website, is capable of making up to 10,000 identical plastic parts in just 24 hours, effectively bridging (or eliminating) the gap between prototype and mass production.

“Voodoo is the only high-volume 3D printing provider that we know of. Instead of focusing on low volumes of high-value parts like prototypes or jet-engine components, we are making ‘everyday’ plastic parts,” said Friefeld. “We use a 160-printer cluster of regular desktop 3D printers and control them with software that we write in-house to produce parts. By number, this is the largest cluster of printers in US, possibly the world, and they are all co-located so that we can ensure the best prices with top quality and consistency for our customers.”

And to be sure, there has been absolutely no shortage of Voodoo customers. Currently the Brooklyn-based company boasts 1,200 of them, including Mattell, VH1, NBC Universal, Lowe’s, and Microsoft. Investors include heavyweights like Tumblr CEO David Karp, as well as KPCB Edge and Y Combinator, the funding group known for backing wildly successful startups such as Reddit, Airbnb, and Dropbox." (http://www.3ders.org/articles/20170125-voodoo-manufacturing-new-age-robotic-factory-could-be-largest-cluster-of-3d-printers-ever.html)