Chaos continues to reign in the industrial 3D-printing space as former tech leader Desktop Metal has emerged from bankruptcy and its former parent company, Nano Dimension, has fired its CEO in a bid to restructure itself.
A quick recap of the history:
In 2023, additive manufacturing was a hot investment topic, and major companies announced several multi-billion-dollar mergers, almost all of which collapsed before consummation. In 2024, Nano Dimension agreed to buy Desktop Metal for $183 million but almost immediately tried to back out of the deal. Desktop Metal sued, forcing the completion of the sale, and Nano Dimension quickly forced its newly acquired subsidiary into bankruptcy proceedings, seeking at various points to liquidate its former partner instead of letting it reorganize.
This week, Arc Public Benefit Corp., a New York-based investment company, bought Desktop Metal out of bankruptcy for an undisclosed sum. Arc officials named longtime DM chief operating officer Thomas Nogueira as the reformed company’s CEO.
Arc CEO Bryan Wisk said he and his partners see Desktop Metal in the same light as Bell Labs, AT&T’s research and development wing that drove massive communications technology advancements throughout the 20th century.
“AT&T’s position in long-distance telephony created a steady stream of real problems (“pull”), and a vertically integrated engine—from research to Western Electric manufacturing—turned answers into deployed infrastructure (“lab-through-production”),” Wisk said in a blog post. “Arc acquired Desktop Metal because we want to build the 21st-century idea factory—open to every company, not just one.”
