Eyþór Rúnar Eiríksson, Eiríkur Eiríksson, Hildur Einarsdóttir and Valtýr Örn Kjartansson / Euler founding team
From a Lego holiday train to the new iPhone Air, 3D printing has gone mass market. Now valued at more than $20bn, the global 3D printing industry spans aviation, medicine, defence, tech and even toys, transforming manufacturing by enabling the creation of lighter and more complex designs while reducing costs and emissions.
But large-scale adoption of 3D printing — or additive manufacturing (AM) — has long been held back by reliability issues and scalability limits.
That’s what Icelandic startup Euler is trying to fix. The company, a spinout from Technical University of Denmark, has raised €2m in a seed funding round co-led by Iceland’s Frumtak Ventures and Nordic tech investor Kvanted.
The fresh capital, which adds to €2m raised in European innovation and research grants, will accelerate product rollout for its AI-powered software platform, designed to detect faults in the 3D printing process in real time and prevent expensive mistakes.
“Our mission is to solve this problem such that we can actually scale additive manufacturing so we can get all these benefits from the technology and solve these small little missing pieces of innovations that is required for it to be widespread and adopted,” Euler co-founder and CEO Dr Eyþór Rúnar Eiríksson tells Pathfounders.
Euler’s intelligent software monitors data from industrial 3D printers to automatically stop defects and predict potential misalignments before they happen.
The cloud-based browser solution connects directly to existing printers, meaning no new hardware is required, and there is an on-promise option for heavily regulated industries were data cannot leave the premises.
“We want it to be as simple as possible and easy to use, almost as if it were a B2C product,” Eiríksson says. “Because industrial software could use some much needed love. It's not designed to be accessible and easy to use.”
Once a company is onboarded to the platform, they connect the printer and Euler’s dashboard streams live data, flagging and defects or anomalies that might require user intervention.
Courtesy of Euler
For one customer, the platform reduced money spent on failed builds by 77%, equating to potential savings of $115,000.
The point of Euler is to enable these companies to scale drastically. The current way of checking for faults, Eiríksson explains, is to have an individual looking through the glass window of a printer like a microwave, waiting and watching for possible issues. But this process could be days or weeks and requires a person with the skill to know exactly what to look for at a minute scale to spot errors.
“That really doesn't scale at all to hundreds or thousands of systems,” Eiríksson says. “And should the skilled operator be spending their time babysitting a printing process? And what are the odds that they are looking at the critical time where a small defect is taking place? That’s very low. We need something more intelligent.”
This also frees up the operators’ time to do other, more value-generating work.
Eiríksson jokes that Euler currently has “100% market share” in Iceland — there’s only one industrial system in the country — but there are intentions to grow globally. Its clients include UK AM startup Alloyed and Dutch manufacturing company KMWE.
“Additive manufacturing is entering a new era of industrial adoption, and Euler’s platform is at the forefront of this,” Kvanted Partner Eerik Paasikivi said. “Their technology is bringing the reliability and intelligence needed to finally make large-scale 3D printing viable.”
If successful, Euler’s software could help make additive manufacturing truly scalable — reducing waste, energy use and costly failed builds, while moving the industry closer to a future where complex parts can be printed on demand, efficiently and sustainably.