Impossible Objects Raises $40M Series B to Scale Industrial 3D Printing

Impossible Objects, a manufacturing company working out of Illinois and New York, has closed a $40 million Series B funding round to expand production of its industrial 3D printing system. The round was led by Inflection Equity, with backing from Aaron Wealth Management, OCA Ventures, Impact Capital and Excell Partners. The company's technology, called Composite-Based Additive Manufacturing (CBAM), represents a shift in what 3D printing can do at scale — moving it from a tool for prototypes into genuine production work.

For decades, 3D printing has carried a promise it largely failed to keep. The technology could theoretically reshape how things are made, but it remained slow, limited in the materials it could handle, and expensive relative to traditional manufacturing methods like CNC machining and injection molding. Those older processes require custom tooling — expensive molds and fixtures that only make economic sense if you're producing thousands of identical parts. Impossible Objects' approach combines speed with advanced composite materials, including carbon fiber, to produce strong, lightweight parts in volume without that upfront tooling cost. The company's CBAM 25 system, which launched in early 2025, can print up to 25 layers per minute — roughly 15 times faster than other production additive systems on the market. Parts it produces reach strength levels up to 200 megapascals, up to four times stronger than competing additive manufacturing processes, with minimal shrinkage or warping.

The technology is already moving into real production environments. Since the CBAM 25 launched, Impossible Objects has taken five orders and begun deploying systems across aerospace, defense, and advanced manufacturing. The U.S. Air Force, the National Institute for Aviation Research, the Oregon Manufacturing Innovation Center, and Rochester Institute of Technology are all working with the system. At U.S. Army Rock Island Arsenal, the technology can support production of up to 10,000 drone bodies per month — a volume that would have been unthinkable for 3D printing just years ago.

The company has also secured $20 million in U.S. government contracts and awards. These include Small Business Innovation Research grants supporting work on high-strength long-range drones, composite parts with strength comparable to traditional manufacturing methods, integrated wiring inside additively manufactured components, and lightweight aircraft structures. The Air Force Research Laboratory has deployed the technology, and it's now included in the U.S. Air Force Technology Roadmap.

Robert Swartz, the company's founder and chairman, frames the moment in historical terms. "We've created a fundamentally new way to manufacture," he said. "This is as important as the mill, precision measurement and interchangeable parts." The comparison is deliberate — he's positioning CBAM alongside the foundational shifts that built modern manufacturing itself.

Gintaras Vaisnys, the managing partner at Inflection Equity, described the funding as doubling down on a company entering commercial scale. "Impossible Objects has developed a 3D printing system that can operate at production rates, and the company is seeing explosive demand across commercial and government applications," he said. Steve Hoover, Impossible Objects' CEO, added that the funding will help the company increase production of its systems, expand customer deployments, and build out the service and commercial infrastructure needed to support a growing installed base.

The timing reflects a broader shift in how defense and aerospace industries think about manufacturing. Stephen Farmen, a retired U.S. Army major general, noted that the nature of warfare is changing as new technologies are deployed. "The defense industrial base needs new advanced manufacturing technologies that can deliver robust and flexible distributed production so we can get new technologies such as drone and counter-drone systems and repair parts to our warfighters faster, more flexibly and with radically shorter delivery timelines," he said. In that context, a manufacturing system that can produce complex composite parts without tooling, at speed, and with the flexibility to adapt designs quickly, addresses a real operational need.

Founded in 2017, Impossible Objects operates from Northbrook, Illinois, and Rochester, New York. The company's next phase will be defined by how quickly it can scale production to meet the demand it's already seeing — and whether CBAM can move beyond aerospace and defense into broader industrial manufacturing, where the same economics of speed, strength, and flexibility without tooling could reshape how things are made across multiple sectors.