Additive Industries

Additive Industries is a Netherlands-based industrial metal additive manufacturing company founded in 2012 in Eindhoven, developing high-precision laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) systems for aerospace, space, and high-technology manufacturing. The company's MetalFab series printers are designed from the ground up for industrial-scale production quality, featuring inline monitoring, automation, and process control that distinguishes them from research-grade systems and enables repeatable batch production of critical flight hardware.

Additive Industries' most notable space application is its partnership with SWISSto12, the Swiss RF component and satellite structure manufacturer: SWISSto12 uses MetalFabG2 printers to additively manufacture over 1,000 RF products for space — waveguides, filters, horn antennas, and complex integrated RF structures in aluminum and copper alloys — with zero in-orbit failures across all launched hardware.

This operational track record makes Additive Industries' systems arguably the most flight-proven industrial metal LPBF printers in the space component supply chain, demonstrating that the surface finish, dimensional accuracy, and material density achievable with MetalFab technology meets space-grade requirements for RF components where surface roughness directly affects microwave transmission losses.

The newer MetalFab 420K system features four 1 kW fiber lasers operating simultaneously over a 420 mm × 420 mm build plate — significantly larger than the MetalFabG2 — targeting aerospace prime manufacturers who need to produce larger structural components (satellite load-bearing frames, rocket engine chambers, cryogenic fluid manifolds) in a single print rather than assembling multiple smaller printed parts. The four-laser configuration reduces build time proportionally and enables different zones of the build plate to print simultaneously with different laser parameters, optimizing density and microstructure for complex parts.

Additive Industries competes with EOS (Germany), Trumpf (Germany), SLM Solutions (now Nikon SLM Solutions), and Velo3D (US) in the high-performance aerospace metal LPBF market, differentiating on process automation and aerospace customer qualification support rather than lowest acquisition cost.