#3DStartup: Voxel8, revolutionising footwear & athletic apparel design and production

Voxel8 is a young American company that has developed a multi-material additive manufacturing solution focused mainly on the design of sports shoes and clothing. While many actors have focused on creating 3D printed soles, Voxel8 designs the entire upper part of the shoe. Its ActiveMix process allows the printing of high-performance and coloured reactive polyurethanes. The startup hopes that it will enable more players to offer mass-customised solutions locally, and at a lower cost. We met with its co-founder Travis Busbee who explained how this platform works and the associated benefits.

3DN: Can you present yourself and your link with additive manufacturing?

Starting from the bottom level to develop brand new materials, and write the code required to pattern structures with them, gave me an understanding of the complexities of AM, but also an appreciation of the unharnessed potential to be had in multi-material additive manufacturing with performance materials. Shortly thereafter, a small group of us from the lab, including Jennifer Lewis and Jack Minardi, decided to co-found Voxel8 to bring innovative new multi-material 3D printing technologies out of the Harvard Lab, and into volume production applications. Since then, we have done some really innovative things and invented several new groundbreaking technologies that have the potential to be totally transformative for the industry.