Its specialty is additive manufacturing and it has risen to the headlines for two reasons. The first, known to professionals, is an innovative extrusion system (patented) which, thanks to the work of proprietary software algorithms, allows the production of large monocoque components, with very complex geometries and made of composite materials with high mechanical and thermal. The second refers to the recent Milan Design Week, where the Como-based company presented Beluga, a small sailing boat made with a single piece 3D printed with recycled polymers and reinforced with glass fiber.
Primo Ventures ed Eureka! Ventures i lead investor
Caracol’s latest bang, on the other hand, is of a financial nature and concerns the closure of its first round of seed financing, worth 3.5 million euros, led by Primo Ventures (with the Primo Space Fund) and Eureka! Venture SGR as lead investors and with the participation of a group of business angels. For the innovative startup from Como, born at the end of 2017 at the ComoNExT innovation hub in Lomazzo, the turning point arrives to continue developing a technology that has taken shape from the research activity conducted (at the Milan Polytechnic) on the 3D world. and generative design and which has established itself in the industrial field for its ability to overcome the limitations of scale and size of traditional printers for rapid prototyping. With the plus of lower operating costs compared to traditional processes and other solutions already available on the market and with the value, as assured by those directly involved, of enabling a printing process in a sustainable key that eliminates (and potentially reuses) the great part of the production waste typical of subtractive systems.
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Doubling of the workforce and more materials processed
The capital raised, the company says, will serve in the short term to increase production capacity and support the expansion of the workforce, which will double over the next 12 months, and will feed the research and development projects currently underway. for the industrialization of the additive manufacturing robotic system, widening the range of processed materials and increasing the number of applications that can be processed in other high-performance sectors in addition to aerospace.
From aerospace to automotive, verticalization goal
The aerospace sector is in fact the sector where the Como-based startup began to establish itself by specializing in tooling for positioning and drilling the fuselage panels and carrying out the engineering of the deployer printing for satellites and casing with high geometric complexity for avionics systems. . The priority is now to verticalize technology in other high-performance sectors – such as automotive and motorsport, nautical, energy and industrial machinery – through a strategy that has already brought car manufacturers to the customer portfolio. multinational energy companies and also particularly innovative manufacturing SMEs.