3DPOD 312: How RLP 3D Prints Silicone Parts Without Molds

A Different Way to Print Silicone

Silicone is everywhere. It is in medical catheters, watch bands, kitchen tools, and aerospace seals. But making silicone parts has always meant molding. You machine a steel tool, pour or inject silicone, cure it, and repeat. For low volumes, the tooling cost alone can kill a project before it starts.

RLP, short for Rapid Liquid Print, takes a different approach. The company extrudes liquid silicone into a hydrogel support bath. The bath holds each layer in place as it cures, so gravity does not distort the part mid-print. When the print finishes, you rinse away the hydrogel and have a pure silicone part.

The result is direct-from-file silicone production with no molds and no minimum order that makes sense.

From the Lab to Customer Builds

Schendy Kernizan, RLP co-founder, started in academia. He worked as a professor and researcher before making the leap to build the company around this manufacturing method. That background shows in how RLP talks about its technology: they are careful to separate what the process can do from what has been validated in customer builds.

In a recent 3DPOD conversation, Kernizan walked through the technology and the business at the same time. RLP is not just selling machines. They are working with customers on medical devices, consumer products, and industrial components. That breadth matters because silicone behaves differently across each of those use cases. A medical-grade catheter has very different requirements than a consumer wristband.

Design Freedom Without Tooling Lead Times

The design freedom RLP offers is real. Complex internal channels, undercuts, and overhangs that would require multi-part tooling in a conventional mold become straightforward in the support bath. You change the CAD file and the next print follows that geometry. For prototyping, that removes a week or more of tooling iteration.

For production, the economics depend on volume. Molding still wins at scale. But RLP targets the gap where traditional manufacturing is uneconomical: low-to-medium volume, complex geometries, and applications where the flexibility of silicone is essential but customization was previously too expensive.

Where the Market Is Heading

The episode also covered the go-to-market challenge. RLP has working technology. The harder question is building a repeatable sales motion for a new manufacturing category. Customers need to unlearn the assumption that silicone means molding. That takes education, sample programs, and close collaboration on first builds.

Kernizan was candid about what that looks like in practice. Investors have taken interest, and the company is actively scaling its team and customer programs. But the path from validated technology to manufacturing standard is longer than most outsiders expect.

What makes RLP worth watching is not just the process. It is the focus on silicone as a first-class engineering material rather than a secondary casting option. If the company can land a handful of flagship customers in medical or industrial markets, it could set the reference point for how silicone parts get made in the next decade.