Mosaic Manufacturing Ltd. announced Wednesday it received $28 million CAD in growth financing to help it produce more of its 3D printers that are built in Canada.
Montréal’s Idealist Capital led the all-equity round, which closed in June, with follow-on investment from previous investor Freycinet Ventures based in Toronto. As part of the funding, Idealist’s François Boudreault will join the board alongside Mosaic co-founders Mitch Debora, Derek Vogt, Chris Labelle, and Freycinet’s James Appleyard. The round also included undisclosed investors that were private family offices, Debora said.
“We were seeing strong traction with manufacturers adopting our technology to onshore their supply chains.”
Mosaic CEO Mitch Debora
Since its founding in 2014, Mosaic has secured $10 million USD of dilutive funding over several rounds from investors including Techstars, Real Ventures, and SOAN. That capital also includes financial support from DDQIC, NGen, IRAP, MaRS, OCE, Venture Lab, CTA, and Canada Makes.
“We raised this round of funding because we were seeing strong traction with manufacturers adopting our technology to onshore their supply chains, and we saw all the right signals to suggest that it was time to scale, but capital became the biggest constraint,” Debora, Mosaic’s CEO, told BetaKit in an interview.
“Having had the money for a few months, we’re already in the scaling phase and working to bring our technology to more factories,” he said.
The Toronto-based startup sells automated 3D printers, plus accompanying software and materials, that manufacturers use in their factories to produce custom plastic parts on demand. Mosaic has a selection of printers ranging from $10,000 USD to $100,000 USD.
The company’s most recent innovation, named Array, launched in the beginning of 2023 and resembles a vending machine with four printing compartments. Inside the Array is a storage area that catches all the 3D printed parts. If a factory operations manager tells the system to create 30,000 parts, the machine can continuously produce the pieces and store them inside the Array over a 72-hour period, Debora gave as an example.
“It can go through the weekend before any type of manual intervention is required,” he said, adding that its customers will have “10, 20, however many [machines] they need” that fits their capacity requirements.
Debora said the company has benefited from Western countries’ recent push to shorten supply chains, known as nearshoring or onshoring. The pandemic, which disrupted manufacturing and led to shortages and jammed ports, along with growing geopolitical tensions with China bolstered the need for Mosaic’s technology, he added.
Mosaic currently has clients in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Germany and Hong Kong. Its customers are mostly contract manufacturers that make products for other companies, particularly in the medical device and machinery equipment and automation verticals. The new funding will help it acquire customers in other verticals and focus on growth in North America and Europe. In the next few quarters, the company plans to make an announcement around its technology producing consumer textiles, Debora said.
The funding will also be used to double Mosaic’s 60 person team, which is located in the Greater Toronto Area, over the next 12 to 18 months. Debora said he plans to build out the senior leadership ranks and grow the commercial division. As well, the $28 million CAD will go towards building out the Canadian-based infrastructure that makes the 3D printers.
“We’re really capitalizing on being first to market here, working with some of the biggest companies in the world,” Debora said, though he wouldn’t divulge who his customers are. “We’ve built this robot operated, mass 3D printing powered system that’s really in a category of its own.”
Feature image courtesy Mosaic Manufacturing Ltd.