EnvisionTEC

EnvisionTEC was a privately held global company that developed, manufactured and sold more than 40 configurations of desktop and production 3D printers based on seven several distinct process technologies. The company filed for bankruptcy[1] in July 2025 and was subsequently sold.[2]

Founded in 2002, the company now has a corporate headquarters for North America, located in Dearborn, Mich., and International headquarters in Gladbeck, Germany. It also has a production facility in the Greater Los Angeles area, as well as additional facilities in Montreal, for materials research, in Kyiv, Ukraine, for software development, and in Woburn, Mass, for robotic 3D printing research and development. Today, the company's 3D Printers are used for mass customized production and to manufacture finished goods, investment casting patterns, tooling, prototypes and more. EnvisionTEC serves a variety of medical, professional and industrial customers. EnvisionTEC has developed large customer niches in the jewelry,[3] dental,[4][5]

Technology

Since it filed its first patent in 1999, EnvisionTEC has developed and brought to market several new additive manufacturing technologies used for 3D printing.

Three of those technologies are based on harnessing light as a tool to cure liquid resin into a three-dimensional object based on a digital design files. EnvisionTEC has also been developing and expanding its process technology beyond DLP and light-based curing technologies, too.

The company's 3D-Bioplotter[14] series now includes a Starter, Developer and Manufacturing model that extrude materials in three dimensions using pressure. Materials range from a viscous paste to a liquid, and are inserted using syringes moving in three dimensions. Air or mechanical pressure is applied to the syringe, which then deposits a strand of material for the length of movement and time the pressure is applied. Parallel strands are plotted in one layer. For the following layer, the direction of the strands is turned over the center of the object, creating a fine mesh with good mechanical properties and mathematically well-defined porosity. The 3D-Bioplotter is frequently used in biofabrication and is being used in a wide range of medical research.[15] Scientists from Northwestern University, for example, have created 3D printed ovary implants using an EnvisionTEC 3D-Bioplotter that may be used one day to treat women experiencing infertility.[16][17]

In 2002, EnvisionTEC started producing Perfactory printers using Texas Instruments DLP[10] projectors. In this process, a vat of liquid photopolymer or resin is cured by projecting images from a digital light source to solidify the photopolymer voxel by voxel, resulting in a solid object. This DLP 3D printing process allows for extremely high resolution, excellent surface finish, and intricate details, making it a popular technology among makers of products requiring high resolution, excellent surface finish and intricate details.

Because the resolution delivered by DLP technologies begins to taper off as the size of the final object grows, or the light source moves away from the part being built, EnvisionTEC later developed Scan, Spin and Selectively Photocure (3SP) technology, which launched in 2013 to 3D print larger objects while maintaining quality. With 3SP, a multi-cavity laser diode with an orthogonal mirror spinning at 20,000 rpm reflects the beam through a spinning drum, where the light passes through a series of optical elements, focusing the light onto the surface of the photopolymer across the Y direction. An Imaging Light Source (ILS) contains a multi-cavity laser diode, its driver, and all optics. The ILS travels in the X direction at 1-2 inches per second, depending on the material being cured, while the laser light scans the Y direction and selectively photo-cures liquid resin based on the data path.

In June 2016, EnvisionTEC unveiled another patented breakthrough—Continuous Digital Light Manufacturing (cDLM) technology[11]—with the launch of the Micro Plus cDLM at the JCK Las Vegas tradeshow.[12]

type	Private
area served	Worldwide
key people	Al Siblani (CEO)
products	Desktop 3D printers Production 3D printers 3D bioprinters Robotic 3D printers Rapid prototyping solutions Direct digital manufacturing
homepage	http://envisiontec.com
foundation	2002

Technology

Products

Founder

See also

References