MakerBot and Ultimaker to Merge

In a big announcement today, Ultimaker and MakerBot have announced a merger to form a new entity.

MakerBot and Ultimaker are names you’ve seen grace these pages for many years now. They were early players in the desktop additive manufacturing space, appearing at Maker Faires and gracing schools and makerspaces for years.

The last few years, we’ve seen them both shifting their business models more and more toward R&D and manufacturing, mainly courting businesses as customers as opposed to individual makers. We do not know the business model the new entity will employ, nor do we even know what it will be called.

What we do know, is that the CEOs of both companies will be retained to co-run this endeavor

The new entity will be backed by existing investors, NPM Capital and Stratasys (Nasdaq: SSYS), and will benefit from a planned cash investment of $62.4 million to fuel innovation and expansion into new markets. The new company will be led by Nadav Goshen, current MakerBot CEO, and Jürgen von Hollen, current Ultimaker CEO, who will act as Co-CEOs, with Nadav managing operations and R&D and Jürgen managing the commercial functions.

This will be an interesting time. We’re curious to see how these two will combine their technologies and approaches. One big question, at least for the maker community, is if this will have any effect on Thingiverse.com and Youmagine.com. These 3D printable file repositories are owned by MakerBot (Stratsys) and Ultimaker respectively.

correction: Youmagine is not part of Ultimaker.