3D Hubs and Protolabs Want to Create the World’s Largest Manufacturing Package

Last January, Protolabs 3D Printing Service announced the acquisition of 3D Hubs online manufacturing service. Launched in 2013, the service has undergone a number of developments over the past few years, starting with a 3D printing platform where customers could directly order and receive the parts they wanted from 3D Hubs employees. After many strategic investments and developments, 3D Hubs has expanded its offering to include subtractive manufacturing solutions, with the goal of offering global customers a broad portfolio of production techniques to meet their needs. The acquisition of 3D Hubs by Protolabs offers new perspectives to the company and together they aim to become the largest manufacturing platform in the world. But what will this acquisition change for the Amsterdam-based company? What are the impacts, in the short and long term, that we will be able to observe? We met with Filemon Schoffer, co-founder and CCO of 3D Hubs, to find out more.

3DN: How would you describe 3D Hubs’ journey since its launch in 2013?

It has been an exciting adventure since the company’s inception! 3D Hubs has changed a lot in the last eight years. We started as a peer-to-peer 3D printing platform – we delivered orders to customers on our bikes ourselves – and we have become the largest 3D printing network in the world. In 2018, we expanded our offering to include CNC machining and began looking at the manufacturing landscape as a whole, moving to a B2B “manufacturing as a service” (MaaS) platform.

We invested heavily in our platform and later also added injection molding and sheet metal to our service offerings. We then focused on developing our network of leading manufacturing partners, which today includes more than 240 facilities on 4 continents, followed by 3D Hubs’ warehouses in Chicago and Amsterdam for internal quality control and customs clearance.