Meet the 3D printing startup that spent five years not selling anything

Most people think of additive manufacturing — better known as 3D printing — as small plastic prototypes or desktop machines producing objects you can hold in your hand. Since emerging in the 1980s, the technology has steadily evolved from a rapid prototyping tool into a serious industrial process used across aerospace, automotive, healthcare, and defence. But scaling additive manufacturing to produce very large industrial components has remained far more difficult.