IQ Capital and Nikon join the industry heavyweight Boeing in backing Ai Build’s plans to automate the factories of the future.

London, October 19^th 2023

Ai Build, the Additive Manufacturing (AM, also known as 3D printing) software company, has raised a Series A round of $8.5 million led by IQ Capital, with participation from Nikon as a strategic investor alongside its existing investors including Superseed, ACT Venture Partners, Atlas Ventures (UK) and Seedcamp.

Established in 2015 by two architects, Daghan Cam and Michail Desyllas, Ai Build offers manufacturers a cloud based solution, designed to reduce costs, lead times and material waste in the additive manufacturing process which has historically suffered from being laborious and error-prone.

Ai Build partners with major manufacturing firms, including Boeing, to expand the use of additive manufacturing in large-scale industrial applications. These applications range from specialized tooling to end-use components in aerospace, automotive, and energy sectors. Early customers of Ai Build have experienced significant improvements, including a 65% decrease in failed production attempts and a 90% increase in overall build efficiency. As Ai Build adds more machines, users, and manufacturing data to its platform, the system’s capabilities and level of automation continue to increase. The company aims to eliminate all inefficiencies caused by human error in order to make the manufacturing process simpler, more intelligent, sustainable, and cost-effective.

Daghan Cam, Co-founder and CEO at Ai Build: “Despite its clear economic and environmental benefits, manufacturers have difficulty implementing additive manufacturing at an industrial scale. This is due to concerns about its reliability and ease of adoption. We believe that automation and smart use of data is the solution to this problem. By partnering with Nikon as a leading technology provider who has a grand vision for the future of manufacturing, and IQ Capital as a deep-tech investor with proven track record of supporting global businesses, we are well positioned to achieve our goal for automating the factories of the future.”

Michail Desyllas, Co-founder and COO at Ai Build: “It is a great privilege to be supported by investors and partners that share and understand the same vision as us. We are consistently learning and evolving the Ai Build platform to be ready for this rapidly growing market. This funding round comes at a perfect time for us to accelerate the adoption of additive manufacturing at scale and innovate together with our clients, partners and investors.”

Mason Sinclair, Principal at IQ Capital: “We’re excited to be working with Ai Build as they bring their automated platform for additive manufacturing to the global market. AM represents a $16bn segment of the manufacturing industry and is growing rapidly at over 20% per annum. This is an exciting time of transformation for the industry and we believe that AI Build will play a critical role in unlocking its potential.”

Yuichi Shibazaki, Corporate Vice President and Officer in charge of Next Generation Project Division at Nikon: “Ai Build offers extensive solutions that enable automated workflows, bringing efficiency and sustainability to the field of AM. In tandem with Nikon’s capabilities, together we will deliver innovative solutions that revolutionize AM.”

Ai Build will use the funding to accelerate its product roadmap, allowing it to onboard more customers with higher levels of automation and AI capabilities. Investment will also enable the team to expand into North America by opening a subsidiary in the US, and to continue its expansion in Europe. The engineering teams of Ai Build and Nikon will collaborate to advance the state of the art in additive manufacturing by combining their experience in software and hardware technologies.

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About Ai Build

Ai Build is a fast-growing London based Software-as-a-Service company, that is disrupting the Additive Manufacturing industry on a global scale. Our clients are tier 1 companies operating in the Aerospace, Automotive, Construction, Marine and Energy verticals. Our unique software enables them to fully automate the additive manufacturing process from plan to print, radically improving speed, quality, scalability, and application range, across the entire enterprise. We integrate and partner with a growing network of hardware manufacturers, and we are backed by first class investors. Ai Build was recognized as the Winner of the prestigious “Software Award” at TCT 2023.

For more information, please visit www.ai-build.com

About IQ Capital

IQ Capital, founded in 2007, is a London and Cambridge-based venture capital firm that invests in deep tech at Seed and Series A across all deep tech sectors – including generative AI, advanced engineering and novel materials, space-tech, quantum hardware and algorithms, cyber and data security and synthetic biology. IQ Capital has raised six funds with assets under management over $1bn and can invest initial cheques of $1m and scaling up to $50m in its outperformers. All the firm’s portfolio companies have shown the potential to dominate their respective markets on a global scale. IQ Capital’s current portfolio includes leading deep tech companies such as Speechmatics, Thought Machine, Paragraf, Porotech, Nyobolt and Causalens.  The IQ Capital team has achieved over 20 exits to date including trade sales to Oracle, Google, Apple, Facebook, Siemens and several IPOs. 

For more information, please visit www.iqcapital.vc

About Nikon

Nikon has been a pioneer in optical technology markets worldwide since its inception in 1917. Today, utilizing advanced technologies, Nikon offers a wide range of products and solutions from digital cameras and binoculars to industrial precision equipment such as FPD and semiconductor lithography systems, microscopes and measuring instruments as well as products for the healthcare field. In the future, Nikon will take advantage of its core technologies to generate new core pillars of profit including the material processing business; Nikon strives to sustainably grow its enterprise value in the medium to long term.

For more information, please visit www.nikon.com