ValCUN, a Belgian original equipment manufacturer (OEM) of wire-based metal additive manufacturing (AM) hardware, has announced that the company has entered the next phase of its growth trajectory, making key personnel and location moves headed into 2025. First off, in the last few months, ValCUN has hired new employees in its business development, research engineering, and office management divisions.

All of those hires will help support, secondly, the company’s move into a larger facility at the beginning of 2025, still in ValCUN’s current home city of Ghent, Belgium. ValCUN’s Minerva 3D printer relies on the company’s proprietary molten metal deposition (MMD) technology, which involves melting the aluminum wire feedstock in the printhead prior to extrusion.

After a €1.5 million funding round in 2021, ValCUN sold its first Minerva to Belgian research group Sirris about a year ago. The company places a singular emphasis on ease-of-adoption and deployability, to the extent that it has designed its printers to fit through any standard doorframe and run off any two-prong outlet around the world.

Attendees of Formnext 2024 in Frankfurt, Germany (November 19-22) can learn more about ValCUN and its MMD technology at booth D.09 in Hall 12.

In a press release about ValCUN’s expansion plans for 2025, the company’s CEO, Jonas Galle, said, “We are delighted to welcome new colleagues to the team. Each of them are filling up key skill-sets that we were lacking for entering a new company stage and to ensure the continuation of our exponential growth. In addition, we are excited to announce that this team growth is accompanied with the moving to a new larger premises by the beginning of next year. This gives the business the right platform for further growth.”

I think ValCUN’s business strategy does a good job of encapsulating the types of things that AM companies have to be thinking about, in order to succeed at this stage in the industry’s history. For instance, while the ability to fit your printer through a door might not be the first thing most people think about in terms of features that make a successful project, an AM engineer working at Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) — Carderock once told me that he wished more companies would take that exact factor into consideration.

More broadly, ValCUN has focused on off-the-shelf aluminum wire as its initial area of specialization precisely because this can enable the most new users to safely adopt AM for the most widely-used material for the production of metal parts. The company’s MMD technology also minimizes the need for post-processing, as users can remove parts from the substrate with one snap.

Over and over again, AM companies illustrate that they tend do best when they focus on doing one or two things as effectively as possible. In the long run, that may be a sounder strategy for ultimately conquering the most territory, versus the reverse approach of casting as wide a net as possible and discovering what works via trial and error.

Images courtesy of ValCUN