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Fortify DCM-made component. Photo Credit: Fortify

Additive manufacturing (AM) startup  (Boston, Mass., U.S.) announced on March 18 that it has closed a $20 million equity round led by Cota Capital (San Francisco, Calif., U.S.) with additional participation from Accel Partners (Palo Alto), Neotribe Ventures (Menlo Park) and Prelude Ventures (San Francisco). This round of capital will fuel team growth, accelerate expansion in high-value application spaces and transition to volume manufacturing of the Flux Series 3D printers Fortify says.

“The additive manufacturing market is rapidly expanding, and we believe that Fortify is unlocking one of the key barriers to growth of the industry: advanced materials,” says Bobby Yazdani, founder and partner at Cota Capital. “We are excited to collaborate and support the company as it continues to redefine advanced manufacturing.”

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Identifying a need for better material properties in 3D printing, Fortify invented Digital Composite Manufacturing (DCM), which combines proprietary systems for mixing and magnetic alignment with digital light processing (DLP) to produce composite parts with optimized mechanical, thermal and electromagnetic properties. The hardware, combined with software, materials development and processing expertise, is said to be opening up new AM capabilities by tuning material properties for specific applications.

The Fortify team adds that it has continued to steadily grow over the past 18 months with most notable hires including Paul Dresens, VP of Engineering, formerly of Desktop Metal (Richmond, Va., U.S.), and Advisor Rob Stevens, formerly of GrabCad (Cambridge, Mass., U.S.) and Stratasys (Eden Prairie, Minn., U.S.). The round will be used to accelerate time to market on several high-value strategy material development programs between Fortify and its material partners.

“Fortify has been focused on proving the viability of our product and market opportunity over the past 18+ months, and exceeded our goals set at the beginning of 2020,” says Josh Martin, CEO and co-founder of Fortify. “This next round will expand our go-to-market footprint in key verticals such as injection mold tooling while enabling us to capture market share in end-use electronic devices.

Fortify has previously announced partnerships with Henkel (Rocky Hill, Conn., U.S.), DSM (Evansville, Ind., U.S.), Tethon3D and will be making additional announcements over the course of 2021.