Honda's Entry in the Competition for Advanced 3D-Printed Metal Car Components

author: FutureCar Staff    

The auto industry is showing a growing interest in 3D-printed car parts, and Seurat Technologies, a US startup, has recently closed a $99 million Series C funding round for its new 3D-printed metal technology. The funding round includes new investor Honda, as well as other automakers and suppliers such as Porsche, Denso, and General Motors Ventures. This funding indicates the industry's optimism towards the potential benefits of 3D printing, including energy savings, waste reduction, faster manufacturing timelines, increased flexibility in design and materials, and the potential to cut costs and reduce environmental impacts.

Seurat Technologies has been steadily raising funds since 2016, starting with a seed funding round of $3.41 million. This was followed by Series A funding in 2018, with contributions from GM Ventures and Porsche, among others, totaling $13.5 million. In 2021, the company closed a $41 million Series B round. The recent Series C round was led by NV Ventures, a branch of NVIDIA, and also included investors such as Cubit Capital, SIP Global Partners, Maniv Mobility, and Xerox Ventures.

The name Seurat is a reference to the French painter Georges Seurat, who popularized a pixelation system in fine art. Seurat Technologies' 3D printing system is inspired by this technique. The company's co-founder, James DeMuth, explained that the system was developed to address the challenge of fabricating a reaction chamber for a laser-driven fusion system. The team concluded that additive manufacturing on a steel nanoparticle composite was the best approach, but existing 3D printing methods sacrificed either speed or precision. To overcome this, Seurat's system uses pixelation to break the coupling between resolution and print rate.

Seurat Technologies collaborated with the Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which had developed a pixelated laser system called OALV. This system separates one laser beam into multiple parts, enabling additive manufacturing to produce larger parts at faster speeds with greater precision. Seurat secured the technology license for its patented Area Printing technology, which consists of 2.3 million pixels, from the Livermore lab. Honda, one of Seurat's investors, has high expectations for the company's metal additive manufacturing technologies and is looking forward to the future potential.

While Seurat Technologies focuses on 3D-printed car parts, the article also mentions the failed attempt by the US startup Local Motors to create a 3D-printed electric car. However, Local Motors' intellectual property was acquired by the aviation startup RapidFlight, which plans to use it in unmanned aircraft. RapidFlight believes that this acquisition will enable them to introduce new products in a matter of weeks rather than years.

The article concludes with a mention of the political landscape, noting the appointment of Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana as Speaker in the US House of Representatives. Representative Johnson was involved in former President Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The article suggests that the fight for power is ongoing.

FutureCar Staff