First dedicated medical hire at Formlabs. Built the vertical to a core pillar of a $2B company.

Industrial 3D printing was expensive, enterprise-locked, and slow. Formlabs broke all three.

By 2016, Formlabs had done for desktop SLA what the cost curves on LEDs and lithium-ion had done for off-grid solar five years earlier. Expiring industrial IP, commoditizing hardware, and a cleaner user experience were converging — and the clinical world hadn't caught up yet.

Hospitals were still buying $200,000 industrial printers that required dedicated technicians, shipping parts out to service bureaus, and waiting days for anatomical models. Formlabs could put a $3,500 printer at the point of care with biocompatible materials, a workflow any engineer could run, and turnaround times measured in hours. What the company needed was someone to translate that to clinicians — to operating rooms and regulatory bodies, not to makerspaces.

Spent the first months in operating rooms, not selling.

I joined Formlabs as its first dedicated medical hire. Before pitching a single deal, I spent months embedded — operating rooms at Mayo Clinic, radiology suites at UCSF, VA hospital labs, Northwell Health's 3D printing program. Watching how surgeons actually made decisions. Watching where 3D models would actually fit in a clinical workflow. Watching where regulatory burden would kill a deal if we didn't address it upfront.

The same observe-first method I'd used in Liberian clinics and Kenyan kiosks, applied to American hospitals. What surfaced was a market that wanted this technology but didn't know how to adopt it, didn't trust it at the point of care, and didn't see a clear regulatory path.

The strategy that followed was about legitimacy. If we wanted hospitals to bring 3D printing into operating rooms, we needed to meet them where their procurement, regulatory, and clinical trust already lived. That meant partnering with the institutions they already trusted — and getting Formlabs validated in their existing workflows, not asking them to invent new ones.

Each of those partnerships was a first of its kind for desktop medical 3D printing. Materialise made Formlabs the first desktop SLA 3D printer validated in their FDA-cleared Mimics inPrint workflow. GE Healthcare built an exclusive software-hardware bundle with Formlabs for radiologists. STERIS — the world's largest sterilization equipment vendor — partnered exclusively with Formlabs on sterilization workflows for 3D-printed medical devices. Vizient, the nation's largest healthcare GPO, put Formlabs in its catalog as the first 3D printing company ever listed.

The enterprise product was Form Cell — a fully automated 3D printing workflow that took printers, post-processing hardware, and software orchestration and packaged them for production environments. Priced from $100,000 to $150,000 per deployment depending on configuration, Form Cell was roughly 30–40× the price of Formlabs' flagship printer, and represented the company's first real entry into enterprise-scale customer segments.

I took Form Cell from early prototype through commercial launch: market research, value proposition, pricing, sales collateral, qualification tools. I called the leads. I shaped the packages. I sold the first deployments — including the very first to Northwell Health, the largest health system in New York State, which Fast Company covered as a "World Changing Idea".

Enterprise healthcare customers don't buy printers. They buy ecosystems. That framing drove two other product lines I led.

Elastic Resin. A flexible tissue-simulation material launched in 2018 for surgical planning models and soft-tissue applications. It became the most successful material launch in Formlabs history — and a product whose sales volume alone validated the thesis that healthcare was a distinct customer segment, not an adjacent one.

Enterprise Service Plan. I conceptualized and commercialized Formlabs' first Enterprise Service Plan — training, repair, regulatory support, and ongoing service — primarily for medical customers. It generated hundreds of thousands in high-margin recurring revenue and, more importantly, gave enterprise buyers the procurement confidence to sign.

By 2023, the medical business had reached a scale the company hadn't imagined in 2017. Formlabs printers were running in 30,000+ healthcare facilities worldwide. The ecosystem enabled 100,000+ surgeries and millions of clinically-used medical devices across Mayo Clinic, VHA, UCSF, GE Healthcare, and hospitals across lower- and middle-income countries.

Concept to FDA-approved design in 12 days.

In March 2020, Dr. Summer Decker — Director of 3D Clinical Applications at USF Health Radiology — called me directly. She'd watched the nasopharyngeal swab supply chain collapse. She had Formlabs printers already deployed in her lab. She wanted to know if we could design, validate, and scale a 3D-printed swab fast enough to matter.

That call worked because the infrastructure was already in place. Because I'd spent three years building trust with healthcare providers, regulatory bodies, and distribution partners, Decker didn't have to explain what 3D printing was or negotiate from scratch. She could call someone who already spoke the language.

Twelve days later, we had a validated design and the first FDA Emergency Use Authorization for any 3D printing company. Our Ohio production facility — 250 printers running continuously — was producing up to 150,000 swabs per day. The design file was freely distributed to other institutions worldwide through a validated workflow we built in parallel. At peak, the swab program represented up to 48% of Formlabs' total company sales.

The swab program earned a USPTO Patent for Humanity and later became a reference model for the White House Digital Stockpile framework — an approach to distributed manufacturing that the pandemic proved necessary and the federal government adopted. In parallel, I hosted a webinar on supply chain resilience with Jeff Immelt (former CEO of GE and GE Healthcare) and Max Lobovsky (CEO of Formlabs) — a sign of how legitimate medical 3D printing had become by that point.

The mission and the personal motivation were the same bet.

My son was born at 25 weeks, weighed less than a pineapple, and spent his first four months in the NICU. He was later diagnosed with cerebral palsy. I'd watched how expensive, slow, and inaccessible the assistive device supply chain was for families like mine — and I believed 3D printing, at the scale Formlabs was targeting, could change that.

That belief showed up concretely in the work. In one of my first months at the company, an email arrived from Matej Vlašič, a father in Slovenia who had engineered his own 3D-printed ankle-foot orthosis for his son Nik — also diagnosed with CP — after 13 prototypes on a Formlabs Form 2. The orthosis cost under $15 in materials. The conventional equivalent would have cost over $5,000. Nik was walking within days.

I've kept in touch with Matej ever since. Formlabs worked with him on materials (switching from Tough to Durable, which better emulates polypropylene), extended the patented workflow to other markets, and funded further research. The personal and the professional were never separate threads. They were the same thread.

Spot the tech curve, then wait for the unlock. Industrial 3D printing wasn't new in 2017 — it had been expensive and enterprise-locked for two decades. What was new was the desktop form factor, the biocompatible materials, and the regulatory path. The work was recognizing the moment and moving first, not inventing the technology.

Partnerships scale what direct sales can't. GE Healthcare, Materialise, STERIS, Vizient — each of those relationships extended Formlabs' reach into markets a direct sales team could never have cracked at that pace. First-of-its-kind partnerships are a force multiplier for first-of-its-kind technologies.