Xometry, a marketplace that brings together seller and buyers for custom manufacturing, was launched in 2014 by founder Randy Altschuler and his partner Laurence Zuriff.
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| Among the technologies Xometry offers is 3D printing, and Altschuler is very bullish on the mid-term possibilities even as adoption rates seem to have slowed. |
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The goal: become sort of the Airbnb of the custom parts sector.
Some seven years later, the company completed an IPO on the NASDAC last week, opening at $44 per share, which quickly doubled on the first day of trading. Prior to the IPO, Washington DC’=-based Xometry had taken in around $197 million in disclosed funding from investors that include Dell, BMW, Bosch, and T. Rowe Price.
The IPO raised about $300 million for the company.
That after the company had grown revenues to $141 million in 2020, with average growth of over 90%. Xometry generates substantially all its revenue from the prices they charge buyers on their platform, though there’s an emphasis on providing value-add services to sellers such as supplies and financing.
According to an article on Forbes.com by writer Tom Taulli, before launching the company, Altschuler and Zuriff spend months talking to both manufacturing jobs shops and buyers of such manufacturing services.
The key takeaways?
On the manufacturing side, small manufacturers were usually dependent on large local customers, which posed considerable risk. They also spent murch time responding to requests for pricing for custom parts that failed to turn into real orders.
On the buyer side, it was hard to find qualified job shops, and it was difficult to know what a fair price was.
To address some of these issues, Xometry built a quoting platform using Artificial Intelligence (AI) capable of providing instant pricing based on attributes such as volume, material, location and the manufacturing process needed/
This gives manufacturers rapid quotes for their projects, and some assurance they are being quoted a fair price.
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 Xometry has built quite an ecosystem since 2014. More than 6 million parts have been ordered through the platform since its inception. There are over 43,000 buyers and 5,000 sellers using the sytem, and customers include about 30% of the Fortune 500, according to Taulli.
Among the technologies Xometry offers is 3D printing, and Altschuler is very bullish on the mid-term possibilities even as adoption rates seem to have slowed.
In an interview with Yahoo Finance, Altschuler said that “It takes a long time for new technologies to truly penetrate and to change that paradigm. But I think 3D printing is here to stay. We're constantly adding new 3D printing technologies to our marketplace.”
He added that “I think you will see over time, see more and more customers convert their prototype work to production work. And we do a lot of production work in the Xometry marketplace as well as assemblies. And more and more of those are going to depend on the various new 3D printing technologies.”
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