Impossible Objects Raises $40M for Industrial 3D Printing

Impossible Objects has raised a $40M Series B to expand production of its CBAM 25 industrial 3D-printing system. Inflection Equity led the September 11, 2026 financing, with Aaron Wealth Management, OCA Ventures, Impact Capital, and Excell Partners participating.

The money is aimed at a difficult transition in advanced manufacturing: turning a fast, technically distinctive machine into a production system customers can depend on every day. Impossible Objects plans to build more systems, deploy them in more customer environments, and expand the service and commercial organization supporting the installed base.

That operating layer matters because industrial customers do not purchase print speed in isolation. They purchase repeatable parts, qualified materials, uptime, predictable economics, and an accountable support organization when a production schedule meets the factory floor.

What Impossible Objects Announced

The $40M Series B gives Impossible Objects new capital to scale Composite-Based Additive Manufacturing, or CBAM, across aerospace, defense, and advanced manufacturing. Inflection Equity led the round, while Aaron Wealth Management, OCA Ventures, Impact Capital, and Excell Partners joined the financing. The company did not disclose its valuation or the size of each investor's check.

Impossible Objects said the financing will increase production of its industrial additive-manufacturing systems, expand customer deployments, and build the service and commercial organization required for a larger installed base. That use of funds makes the commercial assignment unusually clear: the company must scale the machinery and the human system around it at the same time.

The financing follows years of smaller disclosed rounds. Built In Chicago reported a $6.4M Series A in October 2017, led by OCA Ventures with participation from several investors that included Inflection Equity. Public financing records also show earlier seed capital and a later venture-equity financing, but the current company announcement does not reconcile a complete historical total, so DevCuration is not presenting one.

How CBAM Works

Impossible Objects built CBAM around sheets of long carbon or fiberglass rather than the filament or powder beds many people associate with 3D printing. The process deposits polymer powder in the required shape, stacks the printed sheets, heats and compresses them, then removes the unused material. The company says this combination produces strong, lightweight composite parts while avoiding tooling required by injection molding and some machining work.

The CBAM 25 is the company's current production system. Impossible Objects reports that it prints up to 25 layers per minute, runs 15 times faster than competing production additive technologies, and can produce composite parts with strength up to 200 MPa. Those comparisons come from the company, not a single independent benchmark covering every competing process, so the useful question is how the claims behave inside customer environments.

The current evidence is an early installed base with demanding users. Impossible Objects says it has taken five CBAM 25 orders since the system launched in early 2025 and has begun deployments involving the U.S. Air Force, the National Institute for Aviation Research, the Oregon Manufacturing Innovation Center, and Rochester Institute of Technology. At the U.S. Army's Rock Island Arsenal, the company says CBAM can support production of up to 10,000 drone bodies per month.

The People Carrying the Handoff

Robert Swartz, founder and chairman, says he began developing the underlying technology in 2009. Impossible Objects' current financing announcement describes the company as founded in 2017, while other company profiles use different dates. The durable fact is the longer technical arc, and DevCuration is leaving the conflicting corporate start date out rather than manufacturing false precision.

Steve Hoover joined as CEO in June 2022. The company's team page describes a career that included serving as Xerox CTO and PARC CEO, positions centered on moving research into products and commercial operations. That background fits the present job: CBAM no longer needs only a technical advocate; it needs an organization that can turn machines into reliable production capacity.

Gintaras Vaisnys sits on both sides of the company's history. Impossible Objects identifies him as an adviser and board member who served as CEO from 2018 through May 2022, while the financing announcement identifies him as managing partner of Inflection Equity. His firm is doubling down as the company enters a more capital-intensive commercial phase.

Defense Demand Is Real, but the Claims Need Accounting

Impossible Objects reports $20M in U.S. government contracts and awards supporting work on long-range drones, high-strength composite structures, integrated wiring, and lightweight aircraft components. The public Small Business Innovation Research portfolio independently lists 11 Phase I awards and eight Phase II awards totaling $10,837,515 for Impossible Objects.

That federal record supports the direction of the company's defense story without independently reconciling the full $20M figure. One 2023 Air Force award, for example, provided nearly $1.8M to expand CBAM materials with uniaxial carbon-fiber substrates. The distinction matters because a company press release can combine contracts and awards from several programs while a public database may expose only part of the complete capital picture.

Defense is also an unforgiving customer environment. A drone airframe or aircraft component must meet requirements that extend well beyond printing quickly. Materials, dimensional accuracy, process repeatability, inspection, field repair, supply availability, and documentation become part of the product even when none of them appears in the speed comparison.

What the Series B Changes

The round moves Impossible Objects' constraint from demonstrating technical possibility toward supporting production responsibility. Each new CBAM 25 deployment creates a different mix of parts, materials, operators, qualification standards, maintenance needs, and delivery schedules. A larger installed base can generate valuable operating evidence, but only if the service organization keeps pace with the equipment.

For manufacturers, the attraction is straightforward. Tool-less production can make low-volume or fast-changing parts more economical, especially when designs change faster than traditional tooling can justify itself. Composite materials can also reduce weight in aerospace and defense applications where mass affects payload, range, or fuel consumption.

The competitive pressure is equally clear. Injection molding, CNC machining, conventional composites, and other additive processes already occupy specific cost, quality, and throughput positions. CBAM does not need to replace all of them. It needs to win the part families where its combination of material performance, geometry, speed, and tooling avoidance produces a better delivered outcome.

The Industrial Test Ahead

Impossible Objects has earned capital around a specific proposition: composite 3D printing can move beyond prototypes and into repeatable production. The Series B gives the company more room to manufacture systems and put that proposition in front of serious customers. It also creates more places where the proposition can be measured.

The next evidence will come from ordinary factory questions. How often do the systems run, how consistently do parts meet specification, how quickly can materials be qualified, what does a finished part cost, and how effectively can the company support customers across Northbrook, Rochester, and a wider deployment map? Those answers will determine whether CBAM 25 becomes an impressive machine or part of the manufacturing routine.

Industrial technology stops looking futuristic when it becomes dependable. Impossible Objects now has $40M to build toward that quieter milestone, one machine, material qualification, service call, and production order at a time.