Formlabs Brings In Ex-Apple Hardware Chief Dan Riccio as Advisor

What changed at Formlabs

Formlabs announced a sweeping board restructuring on August 12. The biggest name in the move is Dan Riccio, Apple's former Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering. He joins as a strategic advisor and personal investor. Riccio spent decades overseeing the design and hardware teams behind the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. His new role puts him directly in charge of advising Formlabs on product development, design rigor, and scaling operations as the company pushes deeper into industrial additive manufacturing.

Maxim Lobovsky, Formlabs co-founder and CEO, moves up to board chairman. He takes over from fellow co-founder Natan Linder, who steps down after fifteen years on the board. Linder stays on as a strategic advisor. Chief Product Officer Dávid Lakatos, an early employee who has led product development for over a decade, is now president and joins the board. Nadia Shouraboura, a director since 2022 and former Amazon supply chain executive, becomes lead director. Existing board member Rob Willett, the former Cognex CEO, is increasing his personal stake alongside Riccio's investment.

Why this matters

Formlabs has been building toward an industrial play for a while. The Fuse X1 large-format SLS printer launched in June at $84,999 with a 330 x 330 x 565 mm build volume and support for packing densities above 30 percent. The company claims production-quality parts in under 24 hours at roughly half the cost per part of comparable industrial powder bed fusion machines. That positioning requires governance that looks more like a public industrial company than a Kickstarter-era startup.

The board changes fit that pattern. Willett joined in February, replacing Carl Bass, the former Autodesk CEO who had been a director since 2017. Shouraboura's elevation to lead director adds another voice with large-cap operating experience. Riccio's appointment is the most visible signal yet that Formlabs wants to be measured against companies like Apple on hardware discipline, not just against other desktop 3D printing brands on price.

The industrial bet

Formlabs now sells both SLA and SLS systems, post-processing hardware, over 45 materials, and a software stack that includes PreForm and Dashboard. The company says its customers have printed more than 500 million parts. Annual revenues surpass $250 million. The Fuse X1 is designed to install in about an hour on single-phase power without specialized HVAC, which is a direct pitch to small and mid-size manufacturing teams that could not previously justify an industrial powder bed fusion system.

Riccio addressed the move in a statement: "Formlabs has quietly built one of the most complete hardware, software, and materials platforms I've seen outside of a handful of the world's best consumer companies. The attention to detail in how these systems are engineered, and the ambition to make industrial-grade manufacturing accessible, is exactly the kind of problem I want to spend my time on."

Lobovsky was equally direct: "Dan spent a career building some of the most beloved hardware products in the world, at an enormous scale, and he did it by obsessing over details most executives don't care about. As we scale Formlabs into the next generation of manufacturing hardware, learning from Dan is going to make our team stronger and our products better."

What to watch

The reshuffle comes two months after the Fuse X1 launch and as Formlabs expands its manufacturing footprint. The company did not comment on whether an IPO is being planned. What is clear is that the board now reads like a deliberate collection of operator experience drawn from publicly traded industrials. That trajectory is hard to miss, and it will shape every major product and pricing decision going forward.