Kumovis Founders Launch Munich Medical Devices to Make PEEK Implants

A decade of PEEK groundwork

The founding team's credentials in medical 3D printing trace back to 2017, when Kumovis spun out of the Technical University of Munich. The startup built a fused layer manufacturing system specifically for high-performance thermoplastics like PEEK. Paired with clean-room technology and a patented temperature-management setup, the Kumovis R1 printer could produce implant-grade parts dense enough for surgical use.

3D Systems acquired Kumovis in 2022 and folded the platform into its medical device business as the EXT 220 MED. That hardware later became the engine behind the VSP PEEK Cranial Implant, which earned FDA clearance in 2024. The Kumovis team built the printer. 3D Systems owned the implant and the hospital relationships.

From toolmaker to implant maker

Munich Medical Devices flips that split. The company keeps design, printing, post-processing, and release under one roof. Co-founder Stefan Leonhardt puts it plainly: "We spent a decade making PEEK printing possible. MMD is where that technology finally becomes the implant."

The opening product line focuses on cranial implants, offered both as patient-specific devices and in series production. Rather than treating porosity as a side effect of the printing process, MMD makes it the core design principle. The implants use a bioactive PEEK formulation built layer by layer into an interconnected lattice architecture. Porous where bone growth needs it. Solid where mechanical load demands it.

The material properties are ones surgeons care about. Osteopromotive, meaning it encourages bone growth. Radiolucent, so clinicians can track healing directly on imaging without metal interference. And metal-free, eliminating the long-term concerns that come with titanium or cobalt-chrome implants.

Why this matters now

Personalized implants have remained expensive and slow partly because the company that designs the printer rarely owns the finished device. Kumovis supplied the machines and expertise while someone else collected the regulatory clearance and hospital contracts. MMD keeps all of that in-house.

3D Systems has tried a different approach, printing cranial implants directly inside hospital departments in Switzerland and Austria. That is the same bet MMD is making at a smaller scale: owning the full pipeline makes personalized implants fast and cheap enough to actually scale.

MMD is testing whether a founder-led team can pull this off outside a large public company. The technology lineage is identical. The difference is who captures the value when the implant ships.