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On Sept. 4, 2025, large-format additive manufacturing (LFAM) equipment supplier Caracol (Milano, Itay) cut the ribbon on its North American headquarters in Pflugerville, Texas, near Austin. Caracol previously established its presence in North America with an office in Austin. But now, it has a permanent and strategic home base.

The new 10,000-square-foot facility serves partly as a showroom for potential customers to get hands-on with the parts and process before investing in one of the company’s pellet-fed polymer composite or wire-arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) robot-driven systems. But behind the showroom, the facility offers something perhaps even more valuable: a footprint for system integration, application development and support in the U.S.

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The Pflugerville site will serve as an “application hub” for co-developing projects alongside customers, as well as an integration site for the company’s turnkey robot-driven 3D printers. The building includes inventory storage, a space for assembling the company’s proprietary extruders, and room for printer integration and testing, including three enclosed bays — two for the Heron polymer systems, and one for its Vipra AM metal system.

According to company cofounder and CEO Francesco De Stefano, the Pflugerville facility represents three aims:

1. Expansion of production. The workspace described above will be capable of producing dozens of systems per year, just for the U.S. market. This expanded localized production will also help to reduce costs and emissions from shipping systems from Europe.
2. Better service for existing customers. “We want to get faster and faster, and closer and closer to our customers,” De Stefano says. Establishing a base in Texas, which can service equipment as well as build it, will speed support for North American users.
3. Collaboration to keep developing the technology. Here again, proximity is key: the Texas location brings Caracol close enough to collaborate with new customers and partners to help drive its LFAM technology forward.

Applications and growth for LFAM

Caracol’s flexible, robot-driven LFAM 3D printers have seen growing adoption in the last several years. Its polymer Heron systems have been adopted for building end-use parts such as yacht components, rail and marine components, and furniture, as well as tooling. The Vipra AM platform, introduced last year, has found applications in large structural components, marine propellers, autoclave tooling and more.

“We are already highly advanced in polymer, and now metal is following,” says Giovanni Avallone, cofounder and chief innovative officer. “Customers pushed us toward structural metal components,” he adds, citing this interest as a motivator for expanding into WAAM.

In some cases, customers are even adopting both systems to make the same product — for instance, using WAAM to build a structural metal component, and then a 3D printed form to layup composite to finish the assembly.

During the open house, a group of Caracol customers shared why they adopted the technology and how they are using these machines, presenting a cross-section of real-world applications. Represented were: , which creates 3D printed furniture; , a furniture and accessible art producer; , which is on a mission to 3D print an entire wet-dry vacuum; , which produces large decorative pieces often for theme parks and hotels; , which applies LFAM in service of electric motorsport parts; and which manufactures large composite parts using 3D printed forms.

At home in Texas

“We believe that North America is going to be a key strategic market,” Avallone says, and the new headquarters embodies that belief. While R&D remains centralized in Italy, partnerships with American companies enabled by this facility will help to grow and advance the two LFAM technologies.

But in the more immediate term, the Pflugerville facility represents expanded, local capacity to assemble LFAM systems and deliver them to customers in the Western hemisphere, effectively tripling Caracol’s production capacity in the U.S.

The integration bays in the back of the building are already producing Caracol’s turnkey robot-driven systems in the U.S. Each printer is built on a commodity robot that provides the motion; Caracol supplies the extruder or WAAM head and control, and handles all the integration between robot and printhead.

An extruder can be assembled in about a day, says Eric Helling, LFAM senior field service engineering specialist. The full integration — from extruder production through complete system testing — takes about 3 to 5 days per Heron platform. Running at full tilt, Caracol says that it will be able to produce up to 100 Heron and Vipra AM systems here per year.

Supporting this level of machine production will also entail scaling the company’s U.S. supply chain by adding and validating new vendors for components.

“Local to Austin, local to Texas and local to the U.S. is the goal,” Helling says.

Originally published on sister brand, .