Ascend Manufacturing closes seed round, lands major project with NNSA

Three people wearing safety glasses stand together in a manufacturing facility. A man in a white lab coat on the left is holding a small 3D-printed part in his hand and showing it to the other two. A woman in a blue patterned blouse smiles while looking at the part, and a bald man with a red beard observes from the right. Large industrial equipment with the Ascend Manufacturing logo is visible in the background.

The founder Justin Nussbaum said Ascend was selected to work on a top-secret project with the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to manufacture small, complex parts.

What if you could print thousands of complex parts in a single day, using materials no one else can? That’s the challenge Justin Nussbaum set out to solve.

Several major issues plague the domestic manufacturing industry.

For starters, lead times on new and emerging products are long, supply chain reliability is constantly changing, 3D printing technologies construct items in layers, and molding can be costly upfront.

“We needed to build a kind of next generation of 3D printing that would allow us to manufacture at much higher speeds, completing thousands of parts per day with these materials that nobody else can print with,” he said.

Sound like an impossible task? Nussbaum said it occasionally felt that way. But his company, Ascend Manufacturing, has turned a corner, secured seed funding, and is now delivering products to customers using his innovative technology every day.