Lynxter Founder on 10 Years of Silicone 3D Printing

Ten years ago, silicone 3D printing was a technical dead end. The material properties that make silicone useful, its flexibility, biocompatibility, and temperature resistance, also make it a nightmare to print. It doesn't melt and resolidify like thermoplastics. It cures through chemical reaction, which means layer adhesion, print speed, and dimensional accuracy all fight against each other.

Thomas Batigne, co-founder and President of Lynxter, took the risk anyway. In a recent Additive Insight podcast interview, he described the early years as a series of "big risks" with no guarantee the technology would ever reach production viability. Most additive manufacturing companies stuck with metals and polymers. Silicone was the problem everybody acknowledged and nobody wanted to solve. What They Actually Built

Lynxter developed a proprietary silicone 3D printing platform that handles the material's curing behavior in-process rather than treating it as an afterthought. The machines now run in hospitals, aerospace facilities, and industrial production lines, applications where material certification and traceability matter.

The pandemic provided an unexpected stress test. Lynxter's machines produced thousands of visors when supply chains collapsed. On the opposite end of the spectrum, printed silicone components ended up in handbags featured on Netflix. Batigne's take on the range:

> "Every part is a story and I think that's why we do this job and why all of this complexity is worth it."

That complexity is real. Silicone printing requires managing cure kinetics, viscosity changes during deposition, and part warping from shrinkage. Lynxter's approach appears to integrate these variables into the machine control loop rather than relying on post-processing compensation. What's Actually Changing Now

Batigne hinted at a forthcoming development focused on productivity. His word: "skyrocket." He didn't share specifics on throughput numbers, material compatibility, or machine architecture, so the claim remains unverified. If the improvement is as significant as suggested, it would address silicone 3D printing's persistent bottleneck, cycle times that currently limit the technology to low-volume or high-value applications rather than true production scaling. The Honest Assessment

A decade in, silicone additive manufacturing is still niche. Lynxter has survived where others haven't, which says something about their technical execution and their willingness to serve markets, medical and aerospace, where regulatory barriers keep competitors out. But "skyrocket" productivity claims need to be measured against actual parts per hour, actual material costs, and actual qualification timelines for new applications.

The pandemic visors proved the technology works under pressure. The Netflix handbags proved it can cross into consumer goods. Whether the next development closes the gap between prototype flexibility and production economics, that is the question that will determine if Lynxter's second decade looks different from its first.

Simon McLoughlin