Desktop Metal Lands $160M More For Its 3D Printing Tech

Desktop Metal, a Boston-area company founded in 2015 focused on 3D printing metal, announced this morning that it raised a new $160 million round.

The new capital follows the firm’s preceding Series D, a $65 million March 2018 funding event. Before today’s new round, Desktop Metal had raised over $276 million. After the new capital, the firm has raised over $430 million since its inception in 2015.

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Desktop Metal did not announce a new valuation but was worth over $1 billion in 2017, before its $65 million Series D. Presumably Desktop Metal’s valuation has risen since.

Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT),  the investment arm of Koch Industries, led the latest round, which also included participation from GV (formerly Google Ventures), Panasonic, and Techtronic Industries. Existing investors Lux Capital, New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Kleiner Perkins, also put money in the Series E.

Desktop Metal is not the only 3D printing unicorn in the market. Indeed, there are at least two others that have reached the valuation threshold.

Chase Koch, president of Koch Disruptive Technologies, is bullish on the company’s prospects, not only as an investor but also as a customer.

Desktop Metal’s 3D offerings have the potential to “redefine prototyping and mass production of metal products, which has profound disruptive implications for manufacturers like Koch Industries,” he said in a press release.

Other customers include the US Department of Defense and MIT.

Crunchbase News reached out to Desktop Metal, asking about its revenue growth. We’ll update this post if we hear back from the company. Update: The firm declined to provide any metrics or results. The question crossed our minds as Desktop Metal has now raised so much money, and at such lofty valuations, that it has huge pressure on its shoulders to generate lots of high-margin revenue. We’d like to know how that part of its business is performing.

Fundraising is a proxy for corporate health, but we’d prefer straight vitals. Which is why, as you can see, we included the preceding quote from Koch. Investors make fine customers as the smaller company can get paid twice (there are risks to this). But this Koch-led round comes after Ford put capital into the firm. Perhaps the bench of Desktop Metal customers is deeper than we initially imagined.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias