Nearly five years after COVID-19 ground the world to a halt, the global supply chain still hasn’t fully recovered. Specialty industries like space travel were particularly hard hit, given the impossibility of heading down to the corner to pick up spare rocket parts.
Industries began taking a long, hard look at 3D printing as a solution to such woes. What additive manufacturing lacks in scale, it makes up for both in terms of creating specialty parts and decentralizing a manufacturing industry that is highly concentrated in a handful of locations across the globe.
Solideon co-founder and CEO Oluseun Taiwo saw firsthand the havoc such global events can wreak on the space industry. He was employed as a propulsion engineer in the additive manufacturing division of Virgin Orbit in May 2020, when the company failed to launch its LauncherOne rocket. Virgin Orbit’s journey ended in May 2023.
“What I saw at that time was, if we had a localized way to manufacturer and didn’t have to rely on the global supply chain during a global pandemic, the company would have done better,” Taiwo tells TechCrunch. “There was this hard thing of needing to build something like 30 rockets a year for the business model to work. We were doing maybe three a year, which was never good enough.”
Taiwo left Virgin Orbit in 2021 to work for 3D printing stalwart 3D Systems in 2021, before founding Solideon at Techstars the following year. The Bay Area-based rocket-printing service has raised $6.5 million in funding to date. It’s just a start, given the firm’s celestial ambitions. Solideon presented onstage today as part of the Startup Battlefield 20 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024.
“What we really do is build robots for deployable microfactories that help 3D-print and assemble large aerospace structures and products,” says Taiwo.
“The reason that matters is you can decentralize manufacturing and actually get closer to building an entire product without any human intervention in the loop. Our long-term goal is to do that anywhere in the solar system at any point.”
Manufacturing for space in space is still a ways off, naturally. In the meantime, the company is focused on solving more immediate-term problems, with an eye on defense contracts. Taiwo notes that the U.S. Defense Department is currently in the process of auditing its own supply chain, in anticipation of further disruption — be it a natural disaster or global conflict.
“The Navy is having the issue with very expensive assets,” he says. “The short term is to go help them solve that problem. The medium term that we’re more focused on is the smaller, autonomous, attributable systems. That’s where we’re seeing the biggest play for technology like this. Building a microfactory that’s very mobile that operates close to where the changing landscape of the conflict is and being able to adapt appropriately.”