Although 3D printing is becoming increasingly popular it is still a niche market which only a tiny proportion of consumers has access to. The Dutch startup Printr is going to launch its operating system Formide in December to make 3D printing accessible to everyone. The young company just received €750.000 in funding, which will be used to grow the team, scale the product and support more 3D printing manufacturers.
Douwe Bart Mulder, founder and CEO of Printr stated: “Printing 3D models is still quite challenging. This is partially because of the complex settings of the printers. Sometimes there can be as many as 60 individual parameters that have to be set per model. With our new platform, Formide, we remove those barriers and make 3D printing accessible to everyone.”
Printr offers more than just an online operating system for 3D printers with Formide – it is an all-in-one 3D print ecosystem, with which the consumer has the option to find, configure and print his 3D model. Formide will be available on the next generation of 3D printers and offers a total package that includes all the steps of the 3D printing process.
Not only the printing process, but also finding suitable 3D models has been a complicated process up till now. That is why Printr has teamed up with 3DShap.es, the search engine for 3D printable content. The customer selects a model on the Formide platform webshop, adjusts it to his liking using a configurator and streams it directly to the 3D printer.
The Formide platform has just finished a closed beta with 250 test users in preparation for the shipment of The Element. The Element is a streaming device, that connects directly to your 3D printer via USB. Formide works both with The Element and with next generation printers.
