Formlabs -- maker of the top-grossing tech project on Kickstarter to date, the Form 1 3D printer -- has grown to a staff of 30 and moved into a larger office in Somerville as it works to finish shipping printers to Kickstarter backers.
The startup, a spinoff from the MIT Media Lab, raised $2.94 million in contributions on Kickstarter last fall; the project remains No. 1 in fundraising in the crowdfunding site's tech category.
The Form 1 aims to serve as the world's first high-resolution 3D printer to be offered at an affordable price level — $3,299. The printer uses stereolithography technology to achieve resolutions traditionally only available from 3D printers costing tens — or hundreds — of thousands of dollars, the company says.
Formlabs owes printers to 1,028 Kickstarter backers, and began shipping units in May. The company has also been taking pre-orders of the printer, and estimates that those printers will start shipping in September, co-founder Maxim Lobovsky said in an interview.
Last week, the startup moved from its office in Cambridge's Inman Square to Medford Street in Somerville, near the Cambridge line. The company has done significant hiring since the Kickstarter campaign, when there were 12 on staff, Lobovsky said. Among the recent hires is the company's first full-time sales and marketing hire.
"We're definitely going to kick our sales and marketing effort into gear once we can get to the point where we can ship quickly," Lobovsky said.
The estimated delivery times for the Kickstarter printers had been January through April. Formlabs has been working to "balance the pressure to get everything out the door and the need to do it right," Lobovsky said.
That means only shipping printers that have passed the company's calibration and test procedures — which has been challenging, he said.
"It's really a completely new class of product," Lobovsky said. "There aren't known techniques for doing these things — we're inventing them as we go along. These kind of things take longer than expected."
He didn't say how many printers have shipped so far, but said it's "not the majority yet." The Form 1 uses components from the U.S. and China, and final assembly is done in California.
After fulfilling Kickstarter and pre-order shipments, Formlabs expects to work with distributors to sell the product, Lobovsky said. The company may begin selling through distributors toward the end of the year, he said.
Founded in 2011, Formlabs is backed by $1.8 million in equity funding. Lead investors are Lotus Development founder Mitch Kapor, Innovation Endeavors (whose founding partner is former Google CEO Eric Schmidt) and MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito, Lobovsky said.
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