Additive Manufacturing Is Growing Up: What Fathom's CEO Sees From 15 Years Inside

When Rush LaSelle joined the additive manufacturing industry fifteen years ago, the pitch was that 3D printing was ready for industrial production. His first years in the field taught him it wasn’t — and his argument now is that it finally is.

What Happened

Fathom CEO Rush LaSelle, in a recent interview with 3DPrint.com, offered a detailed account of how AM’s promise has evolved from aspiration to operational reality. His core claim: “We’ve just reached that level of maturation where we can deliver good outcomes the way we thought we could 15 years ago.”

The discovery that changed his understanding early in his career was a fundamental limitation no one was discussing plainly. When printing parts intended to replace machined components, “the properties are not the same.” Material anisotropy, surface finish, porosity control, and dimensional tolerances all required years of qualification work and process refinement before AM parts could reliably meet the standards that aerospace and medical device customers demand.

Why It Matters

LaSelle’s account is useful because it reframes what maturity means in this context. The AM industry has spent considerable energy on the visible metrics — printer speed, build volume, material range, cost per part. His point is that these were never the primary constraint. The constraint was the qualification infrastructure: the ability to prove, in a documentable and repeatable way, that a printed part would behave like its engineering spec promised.

“Lots of people can print parts. What we’ve really focused on is the process around it” — design optimization, dimensional accuracy, thermal management, post-machining, inspection, and quality documentation. That process wrapper, not the printer itself, is what earns aerospace and medical device programs.

This view aligns with the analysis from AM Post-Processing, which identified post-processing as the primary scaling constraint for industrial AM. LaSelle’s observation adds the qualification layer: it’s not just post-processing, it’s the entire documented proof-chain that makes a printed part acceptable to a regulated industry.

Where Demand Is Actually Growing

Fathom sees the most robust demand in aerospace and medical devices — the two sectors that most rigorously test AM’s qualification maturity — and in defense applications, where lessons from drone manufacturing in Ukraine have accelerated procurement interest in additive production methods. Metal additive, particularly DMLS (Direct Metal Laser Sintering), is growing within that context.

The remaining friction he identifies is workforce: there aren’t enough skilled AM operators compared to traditional manufacturing sectors. This is the next limiting factor — the industry has solved more of the technical qualification challenges than it has solved the human capital pipeline.

Source: 3DPrint.com

Content created with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy.