Fast Radius Raises $48M to Expand Platform for Production-Grade Additive Manufacturing

Fast Radius has announced that it raised $48 million in a Series B funding round led by UPS, with strong insider participation from Drive Capital. Fast Radius says it will use the funds to continue to scale up its global manufacturing footprint as well as its software development, application engineering and sales teams.

“Additive manufacturing is increasingly becoming the logical direction for future supply chain strategies, blurring the lines between physical and virtual warehousing for products in many industries,” said Scott Price, chief strategy and transformation officer at UPS via a press statement. “Fast Radius’ technology platform and additive manufacturing design processes are bringing the virtual warehouse vision to life for their customers, complementing UPS’ global time-definite logistics expertise.”

Fast Radius’ technology platform and manufacturing footprint are intended to help customers bring new products and supply chain models to market that are enabled by additive manufacturing/3D printing. The Fast Radius software platform, also known as the Fast Radius Operating System (“FROS”), supports customers across the product lifecycle. The platform helps customers identify potential applications, conduct engineering and economic evaluations, accelerate new product development and ultimately manufacture industrial-grade parts in Fast Radius factories at scale with the latest additive technologies, according to the company.

“Fast Radius represents the future of manufacturing, supply chains and the fourth industrial revolution,” said Nick Solaro, Partner, Drive Capital. “Fast Radius’ full stack software and production capabilities are defining the cloud manufacturing market.”

Late last year, the World Economic Forum (“WEF”)  recognized Fast Radius as one of the nine companies “best implementing technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution”—the only company so honored that is based in North America.

“Fast Radius’s mission is to make new things possible to advance the human condition,” said Fast Radius CEO Lou Rassey. “The new tools of digital design and additive manufacturing power that mission. Our focus is to help companies imagine new products and bring them into the world.”

The additional funding will help the company to further expand its partnerships with companies across aerospace, consumer, industrial, medical and automotive verticals. The Fast Radius team is headquartered in Chicago and includes senior leaders from McKinsey & Company, Amazon, PayPal, GE and Blue Origin.

Also participating in the Fast Radius Series B financing were previous investors Jump Capital, Skydeck, and Hyde Park Venture Partners.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.