In an interview with Insights Success, Tedd Syao, Founder of Kudo3D, shares his experience and provides resourceful insights about Kudo3D and its products along with its future aspirations of revolutionizing the 3D printing industry.
Below are the highlights of the interview conducted between Tedd and Insights Success:
Give a brief overview of the company, its uniqueness and its vision.
We initiated a project in 2013 to develop an ultra-high resolution 3D printer based on our personal interest and the potential in the future. This printer is Titan 1. The resolution of Titan 1 can reach 37um. The product was released on Kickstarter in 2014 and was the most successful campaign for DLP printer.
In 2016, Kudo3D started developing its second generation technology. After a year, Bean is released on Kickstarter and it is even more successful than the first product. Bean again became the most successful LCD printer on Kickstarter. Overall, we raised about one million and 680,000 dollars through crowd-funding. We focused on high resolution and high precision 3D printing technologies.
Kudo3D is one of the few companies that are capable of developing materials to optimize the performance of resolution and precision. Our goal is to use ultra-high resolution 3D printers to replace semiconductor or traditional CNC process. This will enable a boom in the micro technologies, especially in the biomedical area.
What are the cutting-edge products/solutions offered by Kudo3D?
We have two products with ultra-high resolution and precision. The printer ‘Micro’ has a resolution of 16um which is the highest for DLP stereolithograpy in the industry. This printer is mainly used for the micro applications, such as microfluidics and microneedles. The other printer ‘DENT’ has a resolution of 50um and the precision is better than 0.5%. This printer is the best solution for digital dental applications.
Describe the experiences, achievements or lessons learnt that have shaped the journey of the company.
For a hardware startup company like us, we greatly thank crowd-funding platforms to let us not only get funding but also obtain a lot of exposure. We have two very successful campaigns on Kickstarter. With a nice product and a well-planned campaign, a small company can acquire enough resources to jump start a business quickly. The lessons we learned is that fulfillment is not easy and it could slow down the development for the next product. This is the negative part of using crowd-funding platforms.
What are the challenges faced while providing 3D Printing Solutions and how is Kudo3D serving to tackle them?
The main challenge is that the adaption of 3D printing is slow. The software and materials take time to get matured. There is a lot of knowledge required to perfect the printing result. To tackle this problem, advancing printing technologies and providing educations are both very important. We are planning to integrate the hardware, software, material and education more tightly to accelerate the adaption process.
What according to you could be the potential future of 3D Printing Solution industry and how does Kudo3D envision sustaining its competency?
It depends on the time frame. In the next couple of years, the potential should be on the medical. In the long run, we believe the consumer market will start kicking in. To maintain our competitive advantage, we will further differentiate our products to meet the requirement for all types of applications which includes dental, biomedical, engineering and jewelry.
A Satisfied Clientele
REM3D: I purchased three Titan printers three years ago to replace the $100,000 DLP printer I have been working with for 10 years. Performance of Titan printer is just as good as that of those expensive DLP printers. I have been printing almost every day and produced more than 4000 customized rings per year. My customers are also very happy about the casting results. The printers are super reliable and require little maintenance and calibration after they are set up. I am very happy with my Kudo3D printers and I have purchased one more Bean lately.
SolidCam Estudio: We spent a long time investigating different printing options in the market; FDM, SLA and DLP. Finally, we chose the DLP technology for its great quality and high resolution. After that, TITAN print by Kudo3D was the best option for its great adaptability, being Open Source, and low maintenance. The Open Source option was no longer an essential, because the software that comes with the TITAN includes all the necessary settings to adapt to all models, different resins, and is highly configurable. This has been fundamental in our jobs, because every print is a new challenge. The tools provided by the TITAN allow you to print all kinds of very high resolution models.
About the Leader
Tedd Syao has an experience of 20 years in electrical engineering. Among those years, he worked on a technology called photolithography to create high resolution photonic semiconductor chips. This experience was transferred to stereolithograpy developed in Kudo3D. In addition, he is also specialized in investment. He worked for Citigroup for 5 years. He found and invests in Kudo3D because he believes 3D printing will be the part of daily life in the future. Kudo3D has been the leading company in ultra-high resolution 3D printing.
