Free Form Fibers ramping up production, expects to be commercialized in two years

Oct 26, 2023

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SARATOGA SPRINGS – Free Form Fibers is moving into commercialization after securing about $2.5 million from private investors.

The fiber composition manufacturer spent the last 16 years developing laser-driven chemical vapor deposition technology to create materials for industrial uses. It was able to provide customers small amounts of its composites, but never at the scale they needed, CEO Shay Harrison explained.

"We couldn't provide them more than a few grams," he said. "It's hardware, it's not software. And it is a challenge, it's not writing code."

Free Form Fibers relied heavily on government funding for its work, but the recent infusion from private investors is allowing it to scale production and infrastructure to meet the ever-growing demand.

"We were a bunch of Ph.D.s that really knew how to do the technology, but we hadn't yet started to try to work in a revenue-generating mode for a company," Harrison said.

In the last year, the firm dedicated half of the $2.5 million to constructing larger machinery for its different engineering methods. Harrison said they have made a concerted effort to harness the space in an old cereal-manufacturing facility for the full-scale production tools.

With the expanded hardware, Free Form Fibers aims to deliver pounds and kilograms of material to prospective buyers.

"The commercialization process has been about building up our production capacity, starting to have a dedicated sales function and developing a number of customer relationships at this point," he said.

And moving away from concentrated research and development toward commercialization also meant these engineering brains needed to bring in business minds to help them get to the market. The company hired its first director of sales and business development, a role that previously didn't exist, and employed five more people with hopes of adding a couple more this year.

It completed the first of two phases in scaling production. Harrison anticipates they’ll be able to complete production additions in the same facility but may have to look at expanding into another space once past that point.

The company is selling orders, just not at the rate that will permit it to break even.

"Once we get through the phase to scale up, we will be at a point where we would consider ourselves fully commercialized," he said, noting the expectation is to reach that milestone in two years.

From there, the process will revolve around how quickly the market adopts its offerings.

Companies like General Electric are starting to move away from metal and use the ceramic matrix composites Free Form Fibers makes. Harrison hopes the company will become a provider for such corporations once it hits the market.

Their ceramic matrixes can go in jet engines and other aerospace uses as well as in semiconductors.

"The profitability will come in," he said. "We need to show people that we're not R&D (research and development) anymore, that we are manufacturing, that we can deliver larger quantities of material."