Gianni Zitelli on building Axtra 3D from the ground up

Gianni Zitelli did not wait for the dust to settle at Axtra 3D’s newly opened European headquarters in Vicenza before sitting down for a conversation. The 1,600-square-meter facility—a standalone building housing material validation, application development, manufacturing, and customer support—had just opened its doors when VoxelMatters caught up with the company’s co-founder and CEO, samples in hand and the energy of a launch event still in the room.

The company turned five in April. What began as a friends-and-family seed round in May 2021 has grown into a multinational operation with two facilities, more than 60 installations worldwide, and a repeat customer rate that Zitelli cited as the clearest measure of the company’s health.

A technology built around production

Axtra 3D‘s core offering is the Lumia X1, an industrial-grade SLA printer built around what the company calls Hybrid PhotoSynthesis — a simultaneous laser and 4K DLP imaging system. The laser handles detail work and external walls at a 50-micron spot size, while the DLP projection addresses large surface areas at speed. A proprietary layer-separation mechanism called TruLayer dynamically manages resin detachment, eliminating the hydrostatic forces associated with conventional DLP and LCD printing and enabling consistent imaging across the entire build plate without extended curing intervals.

The result, as Zitelli demonstrated with parts pulled directly from the production floor, is a machine capable of moving between geometrically opposite applications without process changes. A three-kilogram mold printed in a single run sat next to a micro-stent produced on the same hardware and in the same material. Connectors with through-holes in the 50-micron range—a customer produces close to 1,000 per week—illustrated the throughput side of the equation.

“Our technologies are speaking this language,” Zitelli said, holding up a part with wall sections produced entirely by the laser system. “This company is not for prototyping. Our technologies are not designed for that type of application. We want to be only on the industrial side.”

The material used in the connectors was BASF ST45, available through Axtra 3D’s open-access model. The platform supports 405-nanometer resins and has validated profiles for materials from partners like Loctite. Customers who run Axtra-validated profiles purchase materials through the company’s supply chain; those who want to experiment with third-party resins can do so under the OpenAccess model. Connectivity is optional but free: printers equipped with telemetry transmit encrypted performance data to Axtra 3D’s operations team, enabling preventive maintenance without exposing what is being printed.

“Every single printer has telemetry services,” Zitelli explained. We cannot access the data because it is completely encrypted, so we don’t know what you are printing. But we can tell if your printer is running properly. And if it doesn’t work or we see something strange, we implement predictive maintenance to make the business of our customer productive.”

Financing growth with growth

The Herzog family, founders of Concept Laser, led Axtra 3D’s Series A and remain the company’s primary institutional investor. Zitelli described the relationship as one he is “truly grateful” for, while drawing a sharp distinction between his approach to growth and what he characterized as the fundraising-dependent model that defined much of the additive manufacturing sector over the past decade.

“I would say it’s an old-fashioned company,” he said. We grow alongside our revenue, install base, and customers. The success of this company is not based on fundraising or a VC. It is based on the success of our customers.”

Sixty percent of Axtra 3D customers, he said, have placed repeat orders within the first three years of owning a Lumia X1. Protolabs is among the company’s largest accounts. Service is handled exclusively by Axtra 3D staff—direct installation and direct support, without partner intervention—a policy Zitelli said the company intends to maintain for at least the next two years.

Regarding volume, Zitelli does not see high-throughput photopolymer printing as a path toward million-part runs and said so without hedging. “There are many better technologies and many faster and more convenient technologies” for that scale, he said. The target market is the low- to mid-volume production segment: aftermarket components, spare parts, customized consumer goods, and medical devices. At AMUG earlier this year, Axtra 3D and Toyota jointly presented a customized panel application for trucks. One installation running the Lumia X1 at full capacity can produce 50,000 connectors per year; a customer with four or five units can operate at what Zitelli described as an insane level of productivity.

The current commercial model is capital expenditure only. The company offers two hardware configurations — an industrial model and a dental variant — and supports both with Axtra Workflow, a fully connected post-processing system that integrates washing, drying, UV curing, and thermal treatment with the printer and is monitored by more than 155 onboard sensors.

The next five years

Asked about his outlook for additive manufacturing as a sector, Zitelli acknowledged a difficult near-term period but expressed confidence in the industry’s direction. “This industry will become a real industry,” he said. “No more start-uppers and VCs based on fundraising. It will become day by day a more serious and consolidated application, like CNCs or automotive technologies.”

For Axtra 3D specifically, the goal is a top-three position among photopolymerization companies globally within five years. “I want to see this company growing in a stable way,” Zitelli said. “I want to see this team succeed because they deserve it.”