Formlabs Form Studio 1

On October 14th, Formlabs launched Form Studio 1. It’s a professional resin 3D printer that starts at $699. You can learn to print on it in ten minutes, and most jobs finish in under two hours.

Max Lobovsky said why this matters so much in the launch announcement:

“We started Formlabs to build the Form 1 and make professional resin printing accessible to more people. Form Studio 1 takes that ambition to the next level. Affordability matters, but so does getting great parts without hours of tuning. We want anyone - from an engineer to someone exploring a new hobby - to spend more time making things and less time figuring out their printer.”

▶ Watch on YouTube

The early reviews are delightful. Tom’s Hardware gave it an Editor’s Choice. Matt Farmer, who reviewed it, wrote:

“For me, the selling point beyond the name and price is the fact that it just prints. I didn’t have a single issue on that front while testing the Studio 1.”

All3DP called it “the benchtop benchmark” and wrote that it’s “long overdue and an excellent addition to a space that has been chasing pixels with little to show for it over the last couple of years.”

Stefan Hermann at CNC Kitchen, who mostly prints with filament and has never been a resin fan, compared it to the Form 4 and concluded that “the Studio 1 offers most of the same convenience and print quality at a fraction of the cost.” He also gave it the best compliment a German engineer can give:

“I’ve been working with the Studio 1 for a few weeks now, and let me put it in a very German way: I haven’t started hating it again!”

If you want the long version, here’s the launch keynote.

▶ Watch on YouTube

Form Studio 1 ships globally on November 16th, and you can order one here.

In 2010, we invested in MakerBot. The maker movement was just getting started, and MakerBot was at the center of it, creating the desktop 3D printer category at a $2,000 price point. In 2013, Stratasys acquired MakerBot, and our part of that story ended. I never got to find out what MakerBot would have become as an independent company, and for a while I wondered if it could have been the durable, long-term, scaled market leader in desktop 3D printing.

A lot of that era is captured in the Netflix documentary Print the Legend. It covers the creation of MakerBot, Formlabs, and desktop 3D printing. I’m part of the documentary, and there are many cringe-worthy moments.

Max hunted me down after a talk I gave in Boston in 2014, and in 2016 we led Formlabs’ $35 million financing. At the time, 3D printing was at the bottom of the hype cycle, and MakerBot was already on a downward spiral under Stratasys’s ownership. I was delighted to get another shot at helping create a market-leading 3D printing company.

Ten years later, Formlabs is the largest professional 3D printing company founded since the 1980s. Its annual revenue is over $250 million, it’s profitable, and its customers have printed more than 500 million parts. While I didn’t get to play things out with MakerBot, I’ve gotten to with Formlabs, and it’s been awesome.

Max, Dávid, and the entire Formlabs team - congrats.