“Sorry for being emotional. I’m very excited.”

Yoav Zeif, the CEO of Stratasys, takes a breath.

He has just gone through the Stratasys portfolio, technology by technology, and outlined the most pertinent application opportunities for each. Medical modelling is proffered for its PolyJet technology, spare parts is one example for its FDM offering, and the recently announced ECCO footwear moulding application is highlighted for Programmable Photopolymerisation.

Zeif stands in the centre of Stratasys’ Formnext booth. He is surrounded by his company’s polymer 3D printing hardware, including the Origin One and SAF 350 acquired through takeovers of Origin and Xaar 3D, and a host of visitors wanting to look under the hood of each product.

This portfolio has been aggressively expanded over the last couple of years. There have been developments to its FDM and PolyJet lines in the form of the F770 and J850 Pro, for example, and then investment in DLP, SLA and powder bed fusion too. It has been strategically put together to establish Stratasys as not just a leader of polymer 3D printing, but the leader: “We focus on polymers because this is our core competency,” Zeif says. “Stratasys is a polymer company. We are and we will be the leader in polymer additive manufacturing. Period. By far.”

In the Portugal and Denmark development facilities of ECCO, the footwear brand is ‘going beyond’ typical 3D printing applications for the market it operates in. ECCO has been one of many brands to harness 3D printing to produce the midsoles of a shoe, but since adopting Origin’s P3 technology, has also begun to explore mould and shoe last applications.

The resulting moulds, printed using a Henkel Loctite material, are said to match the quality of CNC machined aluminium counterparts, while taking less time and cost to manufacture. ECCO also now has the capacity to print a single pair of mould inserts overnight, which can then endure thousands of shots with zero visible degradation.

For Zeif, if one application could explain why Stratasys moved to acquire a company like Origin, this would be right up there.

“I was managing six months of extrusion and injection moulding [in a previous role] and you don’t get 1,000 shots with polymer. Think about how disruptive it is,” he says. “You don’t need to wait a month for the mould, you can print it [overnight]. I used to print the plastic for irrigation, sometimes I was waiting eight months and twelve months for a mould. Here, you can do it in hours. That’s disruption. That’s additive manufacturing.”

Footwear mould produced with Origin 3D printing technology. 

Stratasys’ acquisition of Origin for $100m was first announced back in December 2020 and completed the following month. Zeif assumed his position as Stratasys CEO ten months earlier, with the company suggesting he has ‘precisely the leadership needed’ for the roadmap ahead. When his appointment was announced in December 2019, Zeif said then that Stratasys was poised to transform supply chains and manufacturing ‘through efficiency and personalisation’, and what has since become clear is that he believed several inorganic developments would be required to execute that transformation. It would start with the buy-out of Origin; the idea being that it would not only give Stratasys what it didn’t have, but what others didn’t have.

“We want to see something unique in what we acquire,” Stratasys’ President of EMEA Andy Langfeld told TCT in September 2021. “In most cases, the innovation in this industry, when it comes to hardware technology, is more of a copy and paste and a small improvement here and there. Now, we saw with the P3 that with their software algorithm and the capability to create materials by software control, this is an advantage. On top of that, we perceive with all of the testing that we have done, that the part quality and the surface finish of Origin was superior to any other DLP solution in the market.”

In Origin, as well as RPS and Xaar 3D, Stratasys also acquired certain cultural elements that, gradually, it had been coming around to. Namely, a more open approach to materials development.

“Material is one of the main constraints that hold this industry between moving from prototyping to manufacturing,” Zeif says. “We are opening up but opening up in a very responsible way.”

The company’s FDM Material Ecosystem is a three-tiered approach that encompasses Preferred Materials, Validated Materials and Open Materials. Materials in the Preferred category are those developed by Stratasys or a third-party materials partner; those in the Validated bracket have come through basic reliability testing; and Open Materials covers unvalidated filaments accessed via an Open Material License.

This, Stratasys believes, allows users to ‘play’ and explore material possibilities, while it keeps a level of quality control by harnessing its own expertise and that of partner organisations. It also expects the programme to help FDM kick down the manufacturing door.

“Collaboration is development, collaboration is progress,” Zeif says. “We can be happy with ourselves and keep introducing one, two, three materials per technology like we have done for so many years, but if you really want to go into manufacturing, you need to collaborate with the big ones, with BASF, with Henkel, with DSM, you have to collaborate with Evonik on the other side. Once you collaborate it’s such a push to the industry. And there are ways to collaborate, share revenues, to share profitability, so it’s good for everyone. It’s better to have a large cake, with many in the ecosystem, which transforms us into manufacturing [than to] not have an ecosystem and be happy with ourselves and keep being in prototyping. The motivation is clear.

“We believe that once you enlarge the cake, and each machine will consume five or ten times more material, even if we have a bit lower gross margin on this material, we still have much more revenue and much more profit. Simple as that.”

DQBD saddle, produced with SAF technology. 

Through its PolyJet and FDM technologies, Stratasys has maintained a strong offering to those companies wishing to leverage 3D printing for prototyping. Its FDM machines, in particular, have also been handy for the manufacture of tools, jigs and fixtures, while there have been a few end-use applications developed with the technology too. But in building out its hardware portfolio through acquisitions, and opening up in terms of materials, the focus moving forward is as much on the ‘high-end manufacture’ of polymer products as it has been in the past on prototyping.

That transition, Zeif believes, will be heavily reliant not just on technology, but also on Stratasys’ relations with the people that represent its customers.

“I visit my customers,” Zeif says, “they are much more advanced than the industry in terms of thinking, where we are going. It’s important to understand the innovation comes there, you just need to listen to them and be there and make sure they can be successful.”

One such customer is German design company DQBD, which has utilised the Selective Absorption Fusion technology Stratasys acquired through Xaar3D for the production of personalised cycling saddles. Developed per the riders’ requirements, these saddles consist of a semi-rigid 3D printed spine and a 3D thermoformed seat pad, with SAF helping to save thousands of euros and weeks of time.

The acquisition of Xaar3D was in motion long before Zeif joined the company and was facilitated by founder and former CEO Scott Crump. In 2017, Crump and SAF lead inventor Neil Hopkinson ran into each other in Israel and, over an impromptu dinner, Hopkinson pitched the idea of Stratasys selling the technology he had been working on for nearly 15 years.

Stratasys then made incremental investments, taking up a share of 15%, then 45%, and then eventually acquiring the whole Xaar 3D business. By that time, Hopkinson and his team had made improvements to the process architecture of its flagship H350 system so that all fused particles on the bed surface experience the same temperature profile across the bed, and also developed the Big Wave system to ensure powder is thermally stable when distributing material across the bed. It was all designed so that, when the time was right, there would be little hesitancy from industry to adopt the technology.

“We’re 100% clear, this is about manufacturing,” Hopkinson told TCT at Formnext, “and this is why this consistency that we’ve got to get high yield, to get consistency of part, we’ve been so meticulous about that because we know it’s an absolute must to go into high volumes. Also, we provide a lot of data for every build; we provide seven pages of graphs of data from key sensors so that manufacturers of the part can track what’s happening and certify their manufacturing. So, we’re within that range of things, we are absolutely about manufacture.”

To underscore this, it was announced at Formnext that the H350 SAF machine will be supplemented by Stratasys’ GrabCAD Print software to ensure an accessible and connected workflow from end-to-end. Users can thus stack parts automatically, gain insights from the software’s reporting and analytics features and utilise GrabCAD Print Mobile and GrabCAD Shop.

As of October 2021, GrabCAD Print is one software component of the GrabCAD Additive Manufacturing Platform which encompasses other tools like GrabCAD Print Manager and GrabCAD Print Shop to provide users with the tools to ‘manage production-scale additive manufacturing operations.’ After building out its hardware portfolio, Stratasys’ attention, and investment, is set to turn to offering ‘solutions’, with post-processing and digital threads both high on the agenda. 

“This is very simple, but I talk with Boeing, they have 16 phases of additive manufacturing, and you need to capture the data, each phase has an input and an output. When you get to the end, to the quality and the inspection, you need to have the data from all 16 phases. We have to invest in it,” Zeif says. “[Also] post-processing, I’m investing a lot of my time on understanding post-processing because I need to deliver the workflow. For each application there is a workflow, that’s the way we think about it, and this is what we’re going to develop.”

For Zeif, the roadmap is clear. As it responds to the needs of the industries it serves, the company intends to keep investing millions and millions of dollars into R&D. By building on top of the portfolio of products it has available today, Zeif believes Stratasys will be set apart from its polymer 3D printing competitors.

“We work hard for it, but it’s not enough to work hard, you also need to work smart. We have core competencies that are hard to imitate. The experience for the application engineers and the knowledge and experience of the people – don’t ever underestimate the power of people because you do business with people. I have a fantastic team, the amount of passion and the amount of dedication and I get my excitement from them. We have the infrastructure for resellers. For me to push another machine to the market is nothing. I have the resellers, and say, ‘sell this one as well.’ I train them, we do the knowledge, the manuals, everything, and we know polymers. This infrastructure is a winning one. And also, we keep innovating. This is what I call building foundations.”

Zeif vaunts about the work Stratasys has done over the years, and the success he anticipates the company will have with Origin, RPS and the SAF technology now on board, while back in the same spot he started at after touring the Stratasys booth. His excitement throughout the conversation might suggest that it is his first time at an additive manufacturing trade show, and his previous roles as Partner at consultancy firm McKinsey and R&D Manager for a chemical company could back that up. But he has walked the Formnext show floor once before. It was on this visit that he decided to accept the offer to become Stratasys CEO. 

“I was here two years ago for due diligence. I did a really thorough due diligence. And the potential is unlimited,” Zeif finishes. “You cannot say no to such a thing. I should pay Stratasys to be here. Think about the possibilities. You wake up in the morning and you can transform the way we are making things. Thank you, I’m grateful for that opportunity.”

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