Stratasys has announced it will acquire MarkForged – a subsidiary of Nano Dimension – for $42.5 million in a cash transaction. Nano Dimension will retain the Metal Binder Jetting product line, formerly Digital Metal – itself a $40M acquisition only four years ago.
MarkForged changed the desktop FDM method of 3D printing with the 2014 launch of the Mark One at SolidWorks World, the world’s first 3D printer capable of printing in continuous carbon fibre.
Stratasys says that the transaction will increase its distribution channel and expand its existing capabilities across key industries, further strengthening the company’s go-to-market strategy.
“This acquisition further advances our capabilities to meet customers’ growing needs in critical areas such as defense and aerospace at a time when additive manufacturing continues to displace traditional manufacturing for high requirement applications in production,” said Stratasys CEO Dr. Yoav Zeif, adding that he believes its teams can ‘immediately reinvigorate revenue growth’ by adding MarkForged products and software systems to its partner networks.
In 2025, Markforged generated approximately $70 million in revenue, which included the Metal Binder Jetting product line not included in this deal.
What DEVELOP3D thinks
From a $2.1B launch on the New York stock exchange in 2021 to an acquisition for $42.5 million a mere five years later, it has been a tumultuous time for Markforged.
With hindsight, few would argue that Stratasys has been in a much better position, as both companies lost swathes of ground on their Chinese competitors while pursuing suitors for business deals over new technologies and better products. For both, this boils down to the interventions of NanoDimension – a company that by aggressively inserting itself into the market by pursuing 3D printing technologies with which to build at speed – which skewed the market and slowed the launch of new Stratasys and Markforged technologies.
Few end users will look upon this period with great fondness. Both companies were heavy favourites in professional design and engineering workshops, and from our experience, many of those users have now since moved to use the new wave of FDM 3D printers from the Far East.
Today, Stratasys is out to recover lost ground. It would be daft to think that this giant of the industry hasn’t the tech, funding and professional reseller network with which to achieve this. While buying Markforged might have come far later than maybe it should’ve done – probably the wrong decade even – the race is now on for Stratasys to wrap up the deal, onboard all its new tech and staff, and put this to work.
And what it gets from this move is highly complementary to its existing tech stack.
Continuous carbon fibre offers a lot of benefits, and despite its aging hardware profile, Markforged still remains at the top for this among aerospace, defence, automotive and industrial users needing parts that are both lighter and stronger than traditional FFF alternatives.
The move also adds to Stratasys’ metals portfolio – Markforged’s Metal X technology and its recently updated the FX10 Metal Kit have some impressive capabilities, including in demand copper parts, at a low entry point for users – something that the company has been desperate to build on. Having finally added Tritone and its moldjet [sic] technology last year, Stratasys is clearly targeting metals AM without the lasers.
While hardly lacking in FDM experience – Stratasys literally created the tech – it will be Markforged’s Digital Forge software that is the big benefit in all this. While not the simply the Eiger continuous carbon fibre printing package it started off as, Digital Forge has continued to evolve, and is a solid platform for both the manufacturing workflow and remote printing, including high performance features such as simulation and inspection with added security. Bringing this in to Stratasys’ own GrabCAD should yield some impressive results for high performance parts.
The race is on for Stratasys to reinstate itself in the minds of designer, engineers and manufacturers as a being worth the premium, and while buying Markforged won’t solve that issue, adding and adapting its technology should help reinforce its position as a go to brand for professionals.
