Impossible Objects Lands $40M to Scale Industrial-Scale 3D Printing

Impossible Objects, a Northbrook, Illinois manufacturing technology company, has closed a $40 million Series B funding round to scale its Composite-Based Additive Manufacturing (CBAM) platform. The round was led by Inflection Equity with participation from Aaron Wealth Management, OCA Ventures, Impact Capital, and Excell Partners.

The company's CBAM 25 system is designed to produce strong, lightweight composite parts at volumes that compete with traditional manufacturing processes. According to Impossible Objects, the system runs 15 times faster than competing production additive technologies. That speed is what separates CBAM from most other 3D printing platforms, which have historically remained prototyping tools rather than production systems.

What CBAM Actually Does

Composite-Based Additive Manufacturing works by depositing composite material layer by layer to build parts. The process uses advanced composite materials, including carbon fiber, to produce parts that are both strong and light. The target applications include aerospace components, defence hardware, and advanced manufacturing parts that would otherwise be produced by CNC machining or injection molding.

The pitch to customers is flexibility without the trade-offs. Traditional tooling-based manufacturing delivers speed and consistency at volume, but setup costs make it expensive at low volumes. Additive manufacturing removes tooling costs but has been held back by speed and material limitations. CBAM aims to close that gap.

Government Contracts and Customer Demand

The funding round follows more than $20 million in U.S. government contracts and awards, including Small Business Innovation Research Phase I and Phase II awards focused on using composite AM for long-range drones and lightweight defence hardware. Those contracts provide both revenue validation and a reference customer base in the defence sector.

Steve Hoover, CEO of Impossible Objects, said the company is seeing high demand for manufacturing that can adapt faster without sacrificing the performance and reliability customers expect in production. The CBAM 25 system was designed, in his words, to meet the high productivity and high reliability needs of advanced manufacturing combined with the flexibility and tool-less manufacturing that modern supply chains require.

Scaling the Business

The new capital will go toward increasing production of the CBAM 25 platform, expanding customer deployments, and building out the service and commercial organization. The company plans to add headcount across engineering, manufacturing, and commercial roles.

Impossible Objects serves customers in aerospace, defense, and advanced manufacturing. The company was founded by Robert Swartz and is now led by CEO Steve Hoover. Its technology addresses a problem the additive manufacturing industry has been chasing for decades: moving 3D printing from prototyping to mass production.

Why This Round Matters

Impossible Objects is not the first company to claim it can bridge the gap between additive manufacturing and production-scale output. What distinguishes this round is the combination of government validation through SBIR awards and commercial traction in aerospace and defence.

The CBAM approach also sidesteps the metals bottleneck that dominates most metal additive manufacturing conversations. By focusing on continuous-fiber composites, Impossible Objects competes in a materials category that offers high strength-to-weight ratios at lower processing temperatures than metal AM systems require.

The $40 million round provides runway to scale the platform and grow the installed base. The question it needs to answer is whether CBAM 25 can sustain its claimed productivity advantage at volume across a broad enough range of customer parts to become a genuine manufacturing standard, not just a niche alternative.