---
title: "Stratasys is doubling down on high-value additive manufacturing"
url: https://www.voxelmatters.com/stratasys-is-doubling-down-on-high-value-additive-manufacturing/
date: 2026-09-28
modified: 2026-09-26
lang: en
author: "Davide Sher"
description: "After a few years, I visited Israel agian. I was invited to visit Stratasys' headquarters to get an update on where one of the industry's market leaders stands after a..."
categories:
  - "Company Visits"
  - "Decision Makers"
  - "Executive Interviews"
tags:
  - "Featured"
image: https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Stratasys-Visit_IMG_5198-640x480.jpg
word_count: 1747
---

# Stratasys is doubling down on high-value additive manufacturing

After a few years, I visited Israel agian. I was invited to visit [Stratasys](https://www.voxelmatters.directory/company/stratasys/)' headquarters to get an update on where one of the industry's market leaders stands after a period of turmoil across additive manufacturing as a whole. I found a company rallying around its most profitable technologies, FDM, PolyJet, SLA, and Origin's DLP, while looking to integrate new opportunities like Markforged continuos carbon fiber and expanding collaboration with other players in the industry, including some of its direct competitors, through the AM Marketplace.

![VoxelMatters visited Stratasys HQ and sat down with CEO Yoav Zeif to learn how the company is building the adoption of real AM production](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Stratasys-Visit_IMG_5210-scaled.jpg)Yoav Zeif, Stratasys CEO since 2020

After a tour of the company's key businesses (you can get a feel for it in the video above), CEO Yoav Zeif sat down with me and walked me through Stratasys' recent moves and its strategy for growth ahead, from drawing on its industrial-grade credentials to build real production volume in sectors like aerospace, defense, and automotive to the company's active fight to defend its patents.

## Taking Markforged into the high-end

[Stratasys announced signing for its acquisition of Markforged earlier this year, awaiting closing](https://www.voxelmatters.com/stratasys-acquires-markforged-from-nano-dimension-for-42-5-million/), and Zeif pointed out that the deal itself is a clean fit for where Stratasys sees the market heading: a polarization between a high end built around full workflows and real value and a race to the bottom at the low end, with a messy overlap in between where $20,000 to $100,000 machines can produce good-enough parts but still can't touch the high end. You cannot print this Antero PEKK material [holding up a massive PEKK 3D printed manifold for a drone] with low-end machines. It won't work because you need a different environment, a different chamber, and different chemistry.

![We visited Stratasys HQ and sat down with CEO Yoav Zeif to learn how the company is building real AM production in aerospace, defense and automotive.](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/A16E8D79-9445-425E-B908-52319EADC077_1_201_a-scaled.jpeg)

Markforged, he explained, strengthens Stratasys by bringing a technology, continuous carbon fiber printing, that doesn't otherwise exist in the market; "tens of thousands of highly satisfied customers"; and a highly skilled team. "They invented 3D printing with continuous carbon fiber, and they did it well... we need to recognize it. "Chapeau," and he added, "We got it for a good price." This was about a third of what Nano Dimension had paid just a year earlier.

Beyond the technology and the customer base, Zeif pointed to Markforged's position in aerospace, defense, and tooling as complementary to Stratasys' own, its go-to-market as complementary too, and its software as simply worth keeping intact: "The software is amazing. We will keep it. It will be an integral part of Stratasys' software offering." On the metal side of Markforged's portfolio, he was equally clear about where it fits and where it doesn't: "It's great for high-end prototyping... but we don't see it as a manufacturing tool."

[https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Creating-a-New-Market-Segment_-Certified-Continuous-Carbon-Fiber.mp4](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Creating-a-New-Market-Segment_-Certified-Continuous-Carbon-Fiber.mp4)

Markforged's metal filament process joins two other metal bets already inside Stratasys. The first is investment casting via SLA, which Zeif called the best solution on the market. The second is Stratasys' investment in Tritone, a local company Zeif described as solving one of binder jetting's oldest problems: uneven distribution of powder particles, which drives warping and inconsistent shrinkage. Tritone works with a resin-based metal carrier instead, can process a wide range of alloys including copper, is useful for data center cooling systems in parts up to roughly 20 centimeters, and functions, in Zeif's words, as "a real manufacturing machine" rather than a prototyping tool, though one that still needs further development before it fully reaches market. Between investment casting, Tritone, and Markforged, Zeif counts three distinct metal offerings inside Stratasys today, with Markforged now the clear leader on the filament side.

## An iAM Marketplace for a mature industry

Zeif came to additive manufacturing from the chemical industry, and he said the contrast in how the two sectors treat collaboration struck him early on. In chemicals, "your byproduct is my raw material, and vice versa," and companies formulate and supply each other constantly because it's simply how the industry makes money. Additive manufacturing, by comparison, is a fraction of that size. "We are nothing" next to a company like BASF, he said, and yet collaboration between AM companies had historically been close to zero. Zeif's conclusion was that the industry's real competitor isn't itself. "The competition for additive is the traditional way of doing things... let's collaborate and show everyone that we are better."

This is the reasoning behind [Stratasys' iAM Marketplace, which launched with twelve participating companies, several of them direct competitors, at Formnext last year](https://www.voxelmatters.com/stratasys-launches-iam-marketplace-to-unify-materials-services-and-expertise-in-polymer-3d-printing/). The logic is economies of scale on materials: producing five tons a year of a specialty molecule is expensive, but producing 500 tons brings the cost down enough to offer fair pricing across the board. "It's working out. It's growing," Zeif said, while acknowledging it remains a process of overcoming old habits as much as a commercial rollout. The marketplace team is based in Germany.

[https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Stop-Competing-With-Each-Other—Compete-With-the-Old-Way.mp4](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Stop-Competing-With-Each-Other—Compete-With-the-Old-Way.mp4)

Stratasys' own market data, corroborated by VoxelMatters' latest Polymer AM market report, shows industrial hardware growth slowing recently even as the broader market kept expanding, largely on the strength of desktop brands like Bambu Lab. Zeif reads that as an opportunity rather than a missed one. His example: roughly 70 percent of polymer additive manufacturing material by volume is PLA and ABS, and that volume represents only about 20 percent of the market's value. "There is no value there," he said. Stratasys' value instead comes from application engineering, R&D, software, and simulation matched to a customer's actual need; "core capabilities are found in qualified, flight-certified parts that, once approved for a UAV program, a customer has no incentive to requalify elsewhere. Getting there took Stratasys several years and, in Zeif's telling, a genuine shift away from its roots in rapid prototyping: "It's a transition... and we are starting to see progress."

![We visited Stratasys HQ and sat down with CEO Yoav Zeif to learn how the company is building real AM production in aerospace, defense and automotive.](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Stratasys-Visit_IMG_5208-scaled.jpg)Stratasys' volunteer network used the company's polyjet technology to turn children's drawings into actual, individually 3D printed action figures.

Stratasys is also active in sustainability and social responsibility, and I had the opportunity to sit down with Rosa Coblens, VP of Sustainability & Communications and a board member of AMGTA, to talk through the company's sustainability strategy, its Mindful Manufacturing framework, and the upcoming fifth edition of Stratasys' Sustainability & ESG report. The strategy is rooted in environmental, social, and governance principles and calls for rethinking how additive manufacturing is designed and delivered: optimizing production processes to reduce environmental impact, strengthening social responsibility, and upholding strong governance. As Stratasys puts it, the goal is to 3D print a better tomorrow.

On the social side, Stratasys has been working closely with communities, and especially children, affected by the event of October 7, through a program it calls Hope Heroes with Kibbutz Zikim and Nir Oz. After children displaced from their homes were asked to draw a superhero representing their own strength, Stratasys' volunteer network used the company's technology to turn those drawings into actual, individually 3D printed action figures. The company has since adopted Kibbutz Zikim and Nir Oz as a long-term commitment, running personalized 3D printed figurine projects alongside educational activities for the community and for hundreds of kids and their families.

## Factories of industrial FDM machines

That shift shows up most clearly in deal size, Zeif said. Where Stratasys once sold a machine here and a machine there, it now closes deals for 7, 10, 12, even 20 machines at a time, with aerospace, defense, and government leading adoption and automotive following behind. Much of that volume runs through Stratasys Direct Manufacturing, which Zeif restructured early in his tenure. At the time, it was unclear whether to keep or sell the business, as competitors had done with similar units elsewhere.

He shrank Stratasys Direct from eight sites to three, cut its non-additive work such as CNC machining and injection molding, and refocused it purely on polymer additive manufacturing using Stratasys' own machines, run entirely by trained staff. The business has grown by double digits for two straight years and, Zeif said, is now the most qualified organization for aerospace and defense additive manufacturing in the US, a status that requires requalifying a machine for a specific part and material combination down to something as minor as changing a belt.

[https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Whos-Really-Driving-Additive-Manufacturing-Adoption_.mp4](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Whos-Really-Driving-Additive-Manufacturing-Adoption_.mp4)

Zeif was careful to frame Stratasys Direct's purpose as adoption rather than competition with the service bureaus that are also Stratasys customers. "I can build a manufacturing cell for you within Stratasys Manufacturing... you get this part from Stratasys Manufacturing, and now you have no uncertainty," he said, describing a model where a qualified cell can later move into a customer's own facility, with Stratasys Direct available for overflow capacity after that.

He drew a similar line around Xometry, a platform Stratasys supplies with material and machines rather than competes with: "What they are doing is quick parts, the business of parts, great. We support them... what we are doing is penetrating new applications." A wider network of service bureaus outside Stratasys Direct carries the same qualification standards, Zeif said, so that large aerospace customers can still get a qualified part elsewhere if Stratasys itself is at capacity.

## Six years and counting

Zeif has led Stratasys for six and a half years, long enough, he joked, to count as a geological era in 3D printing. Asked whether the company matches what he expected going in, he said Stratasys' position at the high end has never been stronger, largely because former rivals like Markforged and Desktop Metal have exited or been absorbed, and Stratasys' valuation relative to 3D Systems, once a fraction of it, has since overtaken it. What he didn't anticipate was how long real manufacturing adoption would take. "The adoption is slower than I anticipated," he said, a direct consequence of steering Stratasys away from rapid prototyping and the downward spiral it would otherwise have been pulled into.

He was reflective about what the slower path demands. "You need to be a believer. You need to have a lot of patience," he said. "We are creating something that no one else can create, and this is part of who we are." Six and a half years in, his summary of the lesson was simple: adoption is slow, but it's steady, and the industry's low end, driven largely by China, moved far faster than its high end ever will. Most companies haven't survived. Stratasys, Zeif said, has, and everything the company does still comes down to the same thing: delivering the best part through the most efficient, most credible workflow.