Ingersoll Rand Closes on $19M Funding Round for Inkbit’s Vision-Controlled Jetting System

Inkbit announced the closing of a $19 million financing round, led by Ingersoll Rand, to advance its multi-material additive manufacturing process, VCJ. In addition to funding from Ingersoll Rand, companies including Future Labs Capital, GC Ventures America, iGlobe Partners, Ocado, Phoenix Venture Partners, Stratasys, Zeon Venture, and others helped to finance Inkbit’s process.

“From the moment we met with the Inkbit team and saw its novel Vision-Controlled Jetting technology, we wanted to be part of the journey to drive commercialization and adoption across life science and industrial applications,” said Vicente Reynal, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Ingersoll Rand. “Together, we can transform how the industry thinks about component manufacturing and accelerate innovation.”

VCJ is a multi-material manufacturing system that scales from prototyping to production on a single platform and utilizes advanced computation, chemistry, and process control to enable the rapid manufacturing of products, including complex industrial fluidics and bio-inspired robots. The VCJ system was initially developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, and combines the scalability, reliability, and throughput of a traditional assembly line with the flexibility and intelligence of 3D machine vision-based feedback control.

The system builds parts layer-by-layer on a platform that moves under several stations, each of which performs specific functions such as material jetting, UV curing, inspection, cooling, and more. It departs from the original assembly line by building multi-functional products in a single pass from raw materials. Inkbit’s VCJ can be applied in fields like robotics, healthcare, mobility, industrial automation, and defense.

“This new partnership with Ingersoll Rand marks a key milestone in the history of our company. We are evolving from an equipment provider to partnering with manufacturers to develop new materials and processes to enable the acceleration and simplification of product innovation,” said Davide Marini, Cofounder and Chief Executive Officer at Inkbit. “For me personally, and for our team at Inkbit, being able to learn from and be inspired by iconic names in American manufacturing is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I look forward to building on this tradition of technical ingenuity and operational excellence. Together, we will create the factories of the future.”

Last year, Ingersoll Rand also acquired two companies for an all-cash purchase of $26 million. The company absorbed Oxywise s.r.o. and Fraserwoods Fabrication and Machining Ltd. to expand an existing portfolio of air compression technology and technical support capabilities. Oxywise and Fraserwoods will be a part of Ingersoll Rand’s Industrial Technologies and Services (IT&S) division.

Oxywise is a Slovakia-based company that develops air treatment solutions with onsite oxygen and nitrogen generators, both of which utilize pressure swing adsorption technology, cylinder filling systems, containerized systems, and gas control solutions. Ingersoll Rand will incorporate this gas distribution technology into its air compression equipment.

Fraserwoods specializes in services, repair and return, and remanufacturing of blowers and pumps for larger OEMs in the vacuum truck industry. Ingersoll Rand will bring on the 13 employees from Fraserwoods for technical support, service capabilities, and aftermarket repair specialty in western Canada.