Markforged, which is headquartered in Watertown, Massachusetts (the USA), and developed Digital Forge — an integrated metal and carbon-fibre additive manufacturing platform — recently announced the acquisition of Teton Simulation Software.

The latter’s SmartSlice technology automates validation and optimises part performance for additive manufacturing applications.

Markforged will integrate Teton’s technology with its 3-D printing software solution, Eiger, as a subscription add-on that will offer customers ‘a streamlined workflow spanning part design, testing, optimisation, validation and printing at the point of need, all on a single, cloud-based platform’.

Markforged said the acquisition enhances the company’s lead in distributed manufacturing by ‘extending its end-to-end platform with fast, automated validation of the most demanding end-use parts and applications’.

The acquisition adds more functions to the Digital Forge, thereby giving Markforged’s thousands of users confidence that printed parts will perform as intended, enabling them to replace even more end-use metal parts with validated continuous fibre reinforcement (CFR) parts.

The company said: “This addition to our software offerings will help customers take the guesswork out of configuring slicing parameters for end-use requirements, knowing they can estimate part performance without the wasteful and slow process of physical testing.”

Shai Terem, Markforged’s president and CEO, added: “Software is the core of Markforged’s solution and our competitive edge. The acquisition of Teton Simulation advances our industry leadership in using software to increase process automation and offers our customers an easy way to validate their parts on the same platform they use to print them. I am excited to welcome the Teton team to Markforged, as we share the vision of leading the future of distributed manufacturing.”