From Prototype to SPAC: How Three Deep Tech Startups Engineered Their Exit to Public Markets | The Scenarionist

What Desktop Metal, Markforged & Velo3D Tell Us About Scaling Industrial Deep Tech into the Public Markets

In 2026, deep tech sits at the core of every serious conversation about productivity, resilience, and competitiveness.
Energy, defense, manufacturing, mobility, and compute all depend on hardware-heavy systems that blend advanced materials, complex supply chains, and software-defined control.

These companies do not scale on brand or distribution alone. They scale on engineering depth, capital discipline, and industrial execution.
They demand teams that understand physics and finance, process control and customer acquisition, semiconductor fab dynamics and public-market dynamics.

Standard metrics still lag this reality. Most dashboards for investors and boards were built for SaaS or consumer Apps. They track ARR, CAC, and net retention. Deep tech runs on different drivers: Capex cycles, qualification timelines, yield curves, gross margin trajectories across product lines, and the ratio between non-recurring engineering and recurring revenue.

The ecosystem needs better ways to read these signals.
Founders, investors, and large industrial buyers benefit from benchmarks grounded in real histories, not only in pitch narratives. That means going back to past cycles, reconstructing what actually happened company by company, and extracting patterns that repeat across technologies and macro regimes.

Metal additive manufacturing is an ideal testing ground for this work. It sits at the junction of materials science, precision hardware, and software, yet it has been exposed to some of the most aggressive capital cycles of the last decade. From the early 2010s hype around “3D printing” to the 2020–2021 SPAC boom, metal AM went from lab curiosity to public-equity story in a remarkably short time.

This analysis reconstructs in detail the journeys of Desktop Metal, Markforged, and Velo3D from inception to their SPAC listings and the first years of life as public companies. It is a comparative case study of three deep-tech startups tackling metal additive manufacturing with distinct technology architectures, and ultimately reaching the public markets through SPAC mergers.

The purpose is to chronicle how each company was founded to address specific technological gaps, how they built out products and early market traction, how they navigated the financing environment of 2020–2021, and what has transpired in the years since listing.

The goal is to make clear the milestones, inflection points, and metrics that defined each trajectory, and to use them to illuminate the interplay between technology development and financial market forces in the 3D printing industry.

Roadmap of the Analysis

• Section 1 – Origins
  discusses the state of metal additive manufacturing before these startups, the founding stories of each company, their initial technologies, and early funding.

• Section 2 – Building the Business
  examines how each company moved from prototype to product line, their target market segments and use cases, early revenue models and unit economics, and go-to-market approaches in the years leading up to the SPAC window.

• Section 3 – The SPAC Moment
  describes the macroeconomic context of the SPAC boom, outlines the mechanics and terms of each SPAC merger (implied valuations and capital raised), and discusses how those valuations related to the companies’ fundamentals and stated uses of proceeds at the time.

• Section 4 – Life After the Deal
  tracks the financial and strategic trajectories of the companies in the public market – revenue growth or shortfalls, margin evolution, cash burn and any need for additional financing, major strategic moves (such as acquisitions or restructuring), and key inflection points and challenges encountered.

• Section 5 – Cross-Cutting Insights Across the Three Cases
  provides a comparative recap of the three trajectories and distills cross-cutting insights – for example, how pre-SPAC unit economics and customer concentration correlated with post-SPAC resilience once the macro environment turned.

• Section 6 – Broader Reflections on Financing Industrial Deep Tech
  offers broader reflections on the role of SPACs and public markets in financing capital-intensive industrial technologies, the interaction with industrial policy and supply-chain narratives, and the limitations of this analysis together with suggestions for further inquiry.

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1. Origins: Technology, Founders, Early Capital

1.1 The Industrial Problem: Metal AM Before the New Wave

Prior to the mid-2010s, metal additive manufacturing was dominated by a few mature processes, each with significant limitations that left many industrial needs unmet.

The most established methods were powder bed fusion techniques – such as laser-based melting (e.g. EOS’s Direct Metal Laser Sintering) and electron beam melting (pioneered by Arcam) – as well as some binder jetting and directed energy deposition systems.

These technologies had enabled the 3D printing of complex metal shapes, but not without drawbacks. Laser powder bed fusion (PBF), for example, could produce high-density metal parts but was slow and costly for anything beyond small batches, and it imposed design constraints because many geometries required support structures to withstand thermal stresses during printing.

Removing those supports added labor and time, and the need to redesign parts for manufacturability (DfAM – Design for Additive Manufacturing) was a barrier for adoption.

In short, traditional metal AM could not easily print “as-designed” parts without engineers significantly altering their designs for the process. Moreover, cycle times were long – often many hours or days per build – and machine throughput was low, making it hard to compete with conventional manufacturing for all but highly specialized, high-value parts (like aerospace components or medical implants).

The cost per part was high, partly due to expensive metal powders and partly due to machine and labor costs, limiting usage mostly to prototypes or very high-performance, low-volume applications.

In parallel, other methods like binder jetting (which prints a binder onto metal powder and then sinters the part) existed in concept but had yet to achieve widespread industrial adoption for metals, largely because of materials challenges and the need for post-print sintering or infiltration which could compromise part properties.

By the early 2010s, the “3D printing” hype had reached mainstream awareness, yet in the specific domain of metal, the technology’s impact on the multi-trillion-dollar manufacturing sector remained minimal.

This was the backdrop against which these three startups emerged: an industry with proven potential but clear pain points – speed, cost, throughput, design constraints, and inconsistent quality – that prevented metal AM from being used in broader production. Each of the three companies set out to eliminate different subsets of these pain points with new technical architectures.

1.2 Three Founding Stories in Context

Each company’s founding was rooted in a recognition of the above limitations and a belief that a radically better approach was possible.