Our guest for today is Christian Staudigel, co-founder and managing director of Headmade Materials. The company, headquartered near Würzburg, in Germany, invented and is now launching the new and interesting Cold Metal Fusion platform for metal 3D printing.

Christian studied Mechanical Engineering at the DHBW Stuttgart and Advanced Materials and Processes at the Friedrich-Alexander-University in Erlangen-Nuremberg. He also completed the Executive MBA program at the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg.

Together with co-founder and managing director Christian Fischer, they invented Cold Metal Fusion technology during their work at the SKZ – The Plastics Center research institute.

One way to think of Cold Metal Fusion is as a hybrid technology that combines the strengths of binder jetting, plastics powder bed fusion and MIM processes. In fact, the founders started with injection molding and found a way to build a bridge in between MIM and SLS laser sintering.

In doing so, they understood the potential of the existing installed base of thousands of running SLS printers available worldwide and that these systems could be converted into metal printers. They have since expanded the initial idea to launch an entire platform to enable industrial manufacturing, working in stealth mode with key players in the AM field behind. Now they have come of stealth and into the open.

Headmade Materials just became part of the AM Ventures Fund, and today we have the opportunity to speak with Christian Staudigel to learn more about how the technology works, their business models and their expectations for future growth in high volume metal AM production.