Desktop Metal is acquiring industrial 3D printing company ExOne

As part of its earnings call this week, Desktop Metal announced plans to acquire ExOne. The Pennsylvania-based firm creates a variety of different industrial 3D printers for industries like aerospace, automotive, medical and defense. More recently, we wrote about the company’s portable 3D printing factories, which are effectively mobile additive manufacturing stations built inside of shipping containers.

We wrote about ExOne back in February, when the company was granted $1.6 million from the DoD, in hopes of taking the systems out into the field. Each unit contains a 3D scanning station with computer and a variety of different ruggedized industrial machines, including a metal and ceramic printer, curing oven, fiber-reinforced plastic printer and a compression modeling station.

“Over the last two years, we’ve really focused on providing our technology into government-type applications: DoD, NASA, DoE,” ExOne’s CEO John Hartner told TechCrunch when that news broke. “Sometimes people talk about disrupting the supply chain and getting decentralized manufacturing. This is decentralized and forward-deployed, if you will. Be it an emergency, humanitarian mission or frontlines for a war fighter.”

Today’s transaction, which is valued at $575 million, finds Desktop Metal purchasing all of ExOne’s common stock.

“We are thrilled to bring ExOne into the DM family to create the leading additive manufacturing portfolio for mass production,” Desktop Metal CEO Ric Fulop said in a release. “We believe this acquisition will provide customers with more choice as we leverage our complementary technologies and go-to-market efforts to drive continued growth. This transaction is a big step in delivering on our vision of accelerating the adoption of additive manufacturing 2.0.”

Desktop Metal has been actively pursuing acquisitions to grow out its 3D printing portfolio since it announced plans to go public via SPAC last August. In January, it acquired EnvisionTEC for $300 million.

“We are excited to join forces with Desktop Metal to deliver a more sustainable future through our shared vision of additive manufacturing at high production volumes,” Hartner said of today’s announcement. “We believe our complementary platforms will better serve customers, accelerate adoption of green technologies, and drive increased shareholder value. Most importantly, our technologies will help drive important innovations at meaningful production volumes that can improve the world.”