Many startups experience a make-or-break moment in their development, one whose outcome can have far-reaching implications that extend well beyond the company’s survival. It could be the launch of a new product line or service. Perhaps it’s the acquisition of a competing firm, or for those that operate at the bleeding edge, the introduction of a ground-breaking technology that the buying public has not yet thoroughly endorsed.
Such was the case with Dror Danai and his former employer, Objet. A member of the executive management team, Danai was responsible for business development at the well-known 3D printer manufacturer, which would one day merge with Stratasys. Yet that future event seemed extremely unlikely on October 7th, 2002, the day he met at the Hotel Caravelle Saigon in Ho Chi Minh City with footwear giant Adidas.
“It took us many months to set up that meeting, as it included senior members of the Adidas management team and almost all of their global suppliers,” said Danai. “My message to them was a dream I’d had since before Objet’s founding, that wherever you design shoes—whether it’s in Herzogenaurach, Germany or Portland, Oregon—there’s no longer a need to fly people from all over the world to manufacturing sites in the Far East. Instead, suppliers and designers could exchange files via the internet and 3D print prototypes without the need for travel, tooling, or lengthy development cycles. It promised to completely redefine the prototyping process for shoemakers.”
His dream was well-received. Adidas suppliers placed fourteen purchase orders for Objet 3D printers within a couple of months. This led to additional investment in what was then a very small company. The infusion of cash came not a moment too soon—Danai noted that Objet “was running on fumes” at that point and would have been forced to close its doors.
As luck would have it, it also saved the shoemakers. When the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus struck parts of Asia the following year and air travel was subsequently prohibited, those who’d invested in Objet 3D printers were able to continue designing, prototyping, and launching new shoes. “I even received permission to create a joint brochure of Adidas and Objet, the very first and one of a kind,” Danai said.
Danai’s dream of changing how manufacturers prototype their products had a happy ending, albeit one that’s also bittersweet. Every workday he looks out the window from his office in Rehovot, Israel to the place where he once worked with so many of his friends and colleagues. For the past ten years, the sign on the outside has said Stratasys rather than Objet, but it’s the same location where he spent years working to build a successful business.
He’s also working with many of the same people. Beginning in 2014, Danai has served as chief business officer for another relative newcomer to the 3D printing space, XJet Ltd. With him are Hanan Gothait, the founder and CEO of both Objet and XJet, as well as chief scientist Ph.D (Physics) Eli Kritchman “a real inventor of everything” and Ph.D. (Chemistry) Eduardo Napadensky, “Objet’s first employee and who recently became XJet’s vice-president of research and development.”
“There are many others who were either with Objet at the beginning or came here soon after,” Danai said. “Some refer to us as the A Team, in that we all heard the original call from our leader Hanan and helped to create a similar team again many years later.”
Ironically, XJet did not intend to become a 3D printer company when it first opened its doors, nor was Danai there at that time. The original goal was to produce solar panels using an exclusive process that jets copper and silver pathways onto a polymer substrate. Unfortunately, the Chinese government began subsidizing competing manufacturers soon after XJet made its first few sales—in China, of course—making the young company’s business model far less appealing. Said Danai, “I got a phone call soon after. ‘We the need your help. We’re going back to additive manufacturing.’ So, I went.”
Danai earned a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from Tel Aviv University, followed by a master’s in business administration. His passion, though, is mathematics, and it shows. When explaining his company’s 3D printing technology, he uses the basic volumetric formula r3 (spherical radius cubed) to describe how many of XJet’s proprietary nanoparticles can fit into just one of the metal grains used in laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) or bound metal deposition (BMD) processes.
The answer? Hundreds of thousands, a figure that Danai said gives XJet a significant edge in terms of part accuracy and feature definition. It also eliminates the “big box of messy powder” common with many AM technologies. That’s because XJet suspends its nanoparticles in a liquid that is mostly water with a small amount of adhesive binder. Like building a fine-grained sandcastle, this mixture is jetted onto a build platform, where the binder holds everything together until the “green part” can be sent to a sintering furnace.
Danai explained that because the particles are much smaller than those used in competing systems, the shrinkage amount during sintering is commensurately smaller, just 14.5% compared to the 20% or more seen in other processes. And since XJet prints a green part rather than building a fused metal one with a laser or electron beam, there’s none of the internal, non-isotropic stresses generated during a thermal printing process. “Also, the layer thickness is much smaller, giving the parts better appearance, smooth surface and density,” he said. “This last attribute is quite important, as it improves the component’s mechanical properties, especially in the Z-axis or vertical direction. It’s almost like printing with the particles found in nature. In addition, the sintering temperature is significantly lower than that used by binder jetting technologies and therefore supports the creation of the tiniest features possible without the risk of deformation.”
Danai explained that, while the XJet process is similar to PolyJet (the technology behind Objet and a term that Danai himself coined during a presentation early in the company’s history), it does not compete with Stratasys’ Connex line of 3D printers. For starters, XJet produces metal and ceramic parts, not ones made of polymer. And as already noted, the particles are far smaller, raising the bar on part accuracy across the 3D printing spectrum.
“It’s somewhat ironic that we’ve seen three major developments in printing technology in each of the past three decades, all from the same team of people here in Israel and all under the same CEO,” said Danai. “The first of these was wide-format printing from a company that Hanan Gothait founded in the late 80s and eventually became part of Hewlett Packard. Much of that team went on to form Objet and as I explained earlier, came to XJet after the Stratasys merger. So three very different technologies, but all of them based on our expertise in dealing with ink-jetting.”
That expertise is paying off. While exhibiting at RAPID + TCT 2021, XJet sold its first Carmel 1400M direct metal machine to Azoth, a contract manufacturer in Ann Arbor, Mich. producing parts for the automotive and medical industries, among others. Danai was also quick to point out that this is not XJet’s first sale—the company has been offering ceramic 3D printers for several years now—but due to technical constraints, metal printers were more challenging and took longer to develop.
For example, the ink delivery system, or IDS, had to be revamped, an effort that required “a few dozen different components out of the several thousand needed to build a printer.” And the furnace—though cooler than the one used for ceramic sintering—requires the introduction of inert gas to avoid metal oxidation. “We also hired our first salesperson for North America, who will be based in the U.S.,” said Danai.
It’s certainly an exciting time for Danai and his XJet colleagues. He calls it “the dawn of a new era,” although he freely admits there’s much more to this era than NanoParticle Jetting. As with his dream of revolutionizing the prototyping process for shoemakers and other manufacturers, Danai feels that 3D printing as a whole will revolutionize everything. That’s because the ability to manufacture products locally will not only shorten global supply chains and reduce dependence on offshore suppliers, but drastically increases the pace at which companies can develop new products.
“If I have to summarize it in one sentence, 3D printing enables the move from a manufacture and distribute philosophy to one of distribute and manufacture,” Danai said. “Doing so will fundamentally change our society and ways of doing commerce.”
He illustrated this last point with a simple example: T-shirts. A manufacturer looking to produce and distribute millions of T-shirts would quite naturally want to source them in whatever country offers the lowest labor cost and then ship these commodity items all over the world. But by installing t-shirt machines in Phoenix and Fort Worth, Munich and Montreal, we can greatly reduce the waste and pollution associated with our current supply chain model. Now substitute the term “T-shirt machine” with “3D printer.” That is Danai’s vision.
“The philosophy in the past was to make everything in China and when China gets too expensive, then move production to Thailand or Vietnam,” he added. “It was perfectly acceptable to manufacture in one place and distribute products worldwide, regardless of what it does to our planet and the impact it will have on our grandchildren. It’s long past time that we change this outdated way of thinking.”
