Trust before autonomy
Grounding, audit, human-in-the-loop and graduated control. The level is a dial the floor turns, and qualification-impacting actions stay with a human until validated.
About
The parts changed. The floor did not. It should not run on craft and hope.
Powdrix exists to give every production additive floor a system that runs itself: builds prepared and optimised before they start, melt pools held stable layer by layer, parts inspected and qualified automatically, robots handling the physical work, with a human setting the goals and reviewing the exceptions. The vision is to become the autonomous operations layer for the world's additive manufacturing.
Mission
Give every additive floor a system that runs itself
Not a dashboard that reports what went wrong, but a system that keeps it from going wrong, and encodes the craft of a scarce workforce.
VisionEvery production part prepared, printed, post-processed and qualified on Powdrix.
Why
Why we are building this
The fact on the floor that started it.
Additive manufacturing has moved from prototyping to serial production of mission-critical metal and polymer parts: aerospace brackets and fuel nozzles, medical implants, tooling, energy and defence components. Running an AM production floor is still one of the most craft-bound, failure-prone and yield-uncertain processes in advanced manufacturing. A parameter or orientation error, a melt-pool instability, a recoat fault, a thermal excursion or a hidden pore drives a scrapped multi-hour build, a failed qualification or a safety-critical field escape.
Slicers set up the build. Monitoring add-ons record the melt pool. CT machines inspect the finished part. An MES tracks the jobs. Each tool owns a slice, none closes the loop, and the data never connects recipe to signal to outcome. The process engineers who can read it and hold a build on spec are scarce and retiring.
Why now
- The shift to production AM in aerospace, medical, defence, energy and tooling, and the qualification demand that comes with it
- Defence and energy reshoring, machine-fleet scale-up and cost-per-part pressure
- A severe, scarce AM process-engineering workforce that cannot interpret terabytes of in-situ data
- In-situ melt-pool monitoring, CT and vision inspection, edge AI, build simulation, robotic handling and process twins have matured for production AM
Principles
How we build
The principles we work by.
Compounding data
Every supervised correction trains the system. The recipe to signal to CT to disposition corpus is the asset.
Land narrow, expand
One machine, one metric, one baseline agreed in writing. Then the floor. Then the group.
Cite everything
Every answer from the reasoning layer carries its source. Every action carries its evidence, model version and lineage.
Isolate tenants
Parameter sets, geometry, models and memory never cross a customer boundary. On-prem for those who need it.
Say what is planned
Figures are design targets until they are measured. Scenarios are labelled scenarios. Standards are cited, not claimed.
Focus
What kind of company this is
For anyone checking eligibility or category.
- An independent startup building original Physical AI software for industrial additive manufacturing
- A product company, not a consultancy, systems integrator, reseller or outsourced development shop
- Not a cloud provider and not associated with cryptocurrency
- Pre-launch and pre-revenue. Incorporation, headquarters, founders, headcount and funding are not published yet and nothing on this site should be read as claiming them
Run timeline · scenario
What we are actually building
Every Powdrix run is an ordered, inspectable sequence. This is run_7c2e4b on PBF-2 · Ti-6Al-4V bracket family, 24-part build. Scenario completes in 10 steps with one approval gate. Twin recipe #14 selected, one lack-of-fusion precursor at layer 1,872 cleared by a bounded power trim, CT triage in 11 minutes, 23 of 24 parts released with full genealogy and one held for review.
run_7c2e4b
PBF-2 · Ti-6Al-4V bracket family, 24-part build
illustrative scenario
SUCCEEDED
-
01
ingest.job
SUCCEEDED
0.7 s
Floor Orchestrator · Pulled the job from AM MES: 24 Ti-6Al-4V brackets, 60 µm layers, 3,140 layers, density target 99.7%, geometry tolerance ±0.10 mm, AS9100 evidence packet required. Locked the OEM-approved parameter envelope for PBF-2.
-
02
twin.simulate
SUCCEEDED
6 m 12 s
Part Twin · Simulated 40 candidate orientation, support and parameter recipes for thermal field, residual stress and distortion, ranked on predicted density, geometry deviation, takt and energy.
-
03
prep.release
SUCCEEDED
48 s
Prep-and-Parameter · Recipe #14 released: 32° orientation, lattice supports on two faces, laser power and speed inside the qualified envelope. Predicted distortion 0.06 mm, predicted density 99.8%.
-
04
recoat.check
SUCCEEDED
continuous
Recoat-and-Powder · Recoater image checked every layer. Powder lot L-2291 on its third reuse, humidity in window. One short-feed at layer 412 corrected with a dosing increase before the next layer fused.
-
05
melt.stabilise
SUCCEEDED
continuous
Melt-and-Layer · Melt-pool, photodiode and thermal streams fused at 120 fps. Lack-of-fusion risk rose to 0.61 on part 17 at layer 1,872 and was cleared by a 3% power trim inside the envelope within four layers.
-
06
thermal.compensate
SUCCEEDED
2 m 04 s
Thermal-and-Distortion · Interlayer temperature on the tall brackets ran 14 °C above the twin's prediction from layer 2,300. A 1.5 s interlayer dwell held the thermal field inside the predicted band through the top section.
-
07
approve.human
APPROVAL
4 m 30 s
Floor Orchestrator · Melt-and-Layer proposed a hatch-spacing change on part 17 beyond the qualified envelope. Held for the AM process engineer, who declined it and chose to flag part 17 for CT priority instead. Decision logged.
-
08
handle.depowder
SUCCEEDED
38 m
Robot-and-Handling · Plate unloaded by the handling cell on build complete, depowdered, and parts transferred to stress relief. Powder returned to the sieve with lot L-2291 reuse count incremented in genealogy.
-
09
inspect.ct
SUCCEEDED
11 m
Defect-and-Inspect · 24 CT volumes segmented for pores, cracks and lack of fusion in 11 minutes. 23 parts graded accept against the acceptance criteria. Part 17 shows a 180 µm indication at layer 1,870 and is routed to the inspector for disposition.
-
10
release.qualify
SUCCEEDED
1 m 20 s
Quality-and-Conformance · 23 parts released with the full genealogy: recipe, layer tags, melt-pool events, thermal trace, approvals, post-processing cycles and CT result. Part 17 held with a non-conformance opened. Evidence packet assembled for sign-off.
Market
The market
Figures are the company's own estimates.
$15BTotal addressable spend: AM automation, build-prep software, in-situ monitoring, inspection, post-processing, MES and twins
$3.8BServiceable with Powdrix's product and go-to-market
$240MRealistically obtainable within three years, an estimate
~18%Estimated annual growth of the addressable spend
Team
Who is building it
Powdrix is led by its co-founders, Christopher Hayes (CEO) and Jonathan Pierce (CTO). Backgrounds are published here once they can be checked.
Co-Founder & CEO
Christopher Hayes
Christopher owns the design-partner relationships, the pilot structure and the commercial model, starting with the additive floors where scrapped builds and requalification cost the most.
Co-Founder & CTO
Jonathan Pierce
Jonathan owns the machine-edge runtime, the melt-pool perception and control models, the build digital twin and the audit architecture behind every Powdrix agent.
Hiring
The founding roles we expect to open are on the careers page: edge perception, controls and OT integration, simulation, and an additive process engineer.
Writing
Recent from the blog
The parts changed. The floor did not.
Additive used to mean prototypes. Now it means implants and flight hardware. The floor still runs on fixed parameters, spot CT and craft.
Autonomy is a dial, not a switch
A qualified floor does not go from manual to unattended in one step. The level has to be explicit, auditable and reversible.
Hit density before the build
Build success is decided before the first layer. The twin changes when that decision gets tested.
Accelerated computing
Physical AI, at the melt pool
A build is thousands of layers and a day of machine time. Perception has to be local, deterministic and fast, CT has to be triaged in minutes, and the twin has to run before the build. Powdrix runs GPU inference at the printer edge and keeps training, simulation and optimisation in the cloud or on-prem.
Edge perception
One Jetson node per printer for 30 to 240 fps melt-pool, layer and recoater streams with photodiode and thermal fusion. Sub-250 ms alerting and 1 to 2 s bounded recommendations are the design targets. Jetson Thor is planned for multi-laser machines.
CT and vision inference
2D and 3D segmentation models for porosity, cracks, lack of fusion, surface defects and metrology comparison, served per inspection cell. Sub-15-minute CT triage per build is the design target.
Training
Defect, melt-pool-instability, build-failure and AM reasoning models trained weekly over multimodal build data, with gated promotion from shadow to assist to bounded. Dedicated capacity is planned.
Part twin
Thermal, melt-pool-proxy, residual-stress and distortion simulation for recipe ranking, plus robot-cell and queue simulation. Modulus surrogates are planned so sweeps run at production cadence.
Synthetic data
Rare pore, lack-of-fusion, spatter, recoat-streak and distortion scenarios generated and validated against real CT and in-situ data before promotion. 1,000 to 10,000 per qualified part family is the initial target.
Optimisation and analytics
Build nesting, fleet scheduling across machines, ovens, HIP, inspection and robots, energy windows, and GPU analytics over genealogy tables.
Robot handling and serving
Plate, powder and part handling policies trained in simulation and run on Jetson in the cell. NIM packages perception, prediction and reasoning services behind the floor orchestrator.
Guardrails
An agent that can trim laser power needs a leash
Powdrix writes to production printers that make qualified parts. Every capability is scoped to the qualified envelope, every write is policy-checked, and every action is written to an append-only audit log the floor owns.
- Bounded action space. Each agent writes only to an explicit allow-list of printer, oven and cell parameters, inside the OEM-approved envelope and per-tag rate and magnitude limits.
- Policy engine before every write. Autonomy level, part family, qualification status, machine state and operator presence are evaluated before a parameter moves.
- Human approval for qualification-impacting actions. Anything that leaves the qualified envelope, changes a validated recipe or affects a part's disposition waits for a named approver. This stays mandatory until validation exists.
- Immutable audit log. Append-only and exportable. Every action records model version, data lineage, source signals, predicted impact, allowed range, approval status and qualification impact.
- Hard fallback. Loss of the edge node, the network or a model returns control to the printer's own controller and the standing recipe.
- Tenant and IP isolation. Parameter sets, part geometry, defect libraries and process memory never cross a customer boundary. On-prem deployment is available for sensitive producers.
Compliance posture
| Item | Scope | Status |
|---|---|---|
| SOC 2 Type I | Cloud control plane | QUEUED Planned, first 6 months |
| SOC 2 Type II | Cloud control plane | QUEUED Planned, 6 to 12 months |
| SSO and RBAC | Console and approvals | QUEUED Planned, 6 to 12 months |
| AS9100 and ISO 13485 assurance packages | Evidence packets and model change control | QUEUED Planned, 6 to 12 months; not a certification claim |
| Standards-cited reasoning | AS9100, ISO 13485, ASTM F42, ISO 52900 | RUNNING In the design, every answer cites its source |
| Per-tenant isolation and on-prem option | Recipes, geometry, models, memory | RUNNING In the design from day one |
FAQ
Straight answers
The questions operations directors, process engineers and certification engineers ask in the first meeting.
Only inside the OEM-approved parameter envelope, only on an explicit allow-list with per-tag limits, and only at the autonomy level your floor has set. Level 1 is advisory: Powdrix predicts and recommends and a human enters everything. Design partners start there, in shadow mode. Anything that leaves the envelope or affects qualification always waits for a named approver.
Control returns to the printer's own controller and the standing recipe. Powdrix is a supervisory layer on top of the machine controls, monitoring systems and MES you already run, never a replacement for them, so an outage degrades the floor to its current way of running, not to a stop.
Advisory recommendations start from the twin's physics and the part spec in the first weeks. Defect and build-failure prediction improve as layers, CT results and engineer corrections accumulate per part family. The first models are trained on existing in-situ camera data; synthetic rare-defect scenarios augment them only after validation against real CT.
Only if you choose cloud training. Parameter sets, geometry, defect libraries and process memory are isolated per tenant and never used to train another customer's models. Cross-customer learning is federated and IP-isolated and waits on written data agreements. A fully on-prem deployment is available for sensitive producers.
It is designed not to. Validated parameters never change without the sign-off your quality system requires, model changes go through change control, and every action carries model version, data lineage, approval status and qualification impact in the audit log. Powdrix does not claim AS9100 or ISO 13485 certification; assurance packages are planned for the 6 to 12 month release.
You are, as with any process change, which is why every write is policy-checked, bounded, logged and reversible, and why anything that affects qualification waits for a named approver. The audit log records the request, the reasoning, the limits applied and the human decision.