#3DStartup: Inkbit, 3D printer powered by machine-vision and AI

A startup straight out of MIT, Inkbit, is working towards overcoming traditional constraints to 3D printing by giving its machines ‘eyes’ and a ‘brain’. The industrial 3D printer developed by Inkbit is a multi-material machine capable of printing extremely flexible materials with great accuracy. It uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to address challenges in additive manufacturing, especially when using rubber-like materials such as silicone, or high-temperature materials such as epoxy. The system scans each layer that is being printed and corrects errors in real time, while at the same time it uses this information to predict the warping behavior of materials. We met with Davide Marini, co-founder and CEO of Inkbit to learn more about the startup’s technology and activities.

3DN: Can you introduce yourself and tell us how the startup Inkbit came about?

My name is Davide Marini and I am the co-founder and CEO of Inkbit. I am originally from Italy and came to the United States to pursue my PhD in mechanical engineering. I discovered my vocation for entrepreneurship after working for several years as a scientist at Children’s Hospital Boston, after which I cofounded a company called Firefly BioWorks in the area of life sciences. Interestingly, Firefly’s technology relied on shining UV light through a mask to polymerize monomers in a microfluidic channel in order to obtain individually encoded and bio-functional microparticles. It was essentially micro-scale 3D printing, even though at the time I didn’t think of it in this way.

Davide Marini, co-founder and CEO of Inkbit

After Firefly was acquired, I was looking at a number of exciting technologies being developed in various academic labs, in search for my next adventure. I met the inventors of Inkbit’s technology at an event organized by the MIT Desphande Center for Technological Innovation, where they were exhibiting their prototype printer. The team was based at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and was led by Prof. Wojciech Matusik, a pioneer in the emerging field of computational fabrication. I knew very little about 3D printing then, but what struck me immediately in Javier Ramos’ description of the technology was the elegance of the idea. It seemed natural to me that a 3D printer should be able to react and self-correct in real-time while printing. The business card I handed to Javier carried a quote he recognized from a sixteenth century nun, which I took as a sign that I was looking in the right direction.