The evolution of a revolutionary idea

If you choose the right paths, sometimes you walk to a transformational milestone. At Kabuni, our journey has gone from serving interior designers to helping fashion a new global category: 3-D printing on an industrial scale (also known as additive manufacturing).

Although we are at an exciting time, we’ve come here honestly – and it hasn’t been easy. Today’s historic STO announcement highlighting Kabuni’s evolution to additive manufacturing is really a people story founded on curiosity, insight and embracing first-mover status.

Cookie-cutter doesn’t cut it

Three years ago, Kabuni started as a marketplace for interior designers looking for furniture and home decor. We built up a market of approximately 50, 000 interior designers. The Insight: What we constantly kept hearing from interior designers was they wanted unique furniture, not mainstream. So we switched to an almost Etsy-type platform offering up to 100 unique products. Interior designers liked it. The Problem: We struggled to achieve scale.

The a-ha awakening

I went to a conference where the keynote address was delivered by Dr. Peter Diamandis, founder of the X-Prize Foundation, co-founder and chairman of Singularity University. He made a fairly profound statement that resonated:

“Post 2020, any company in this room will not be in existence long after if they don’t look at exponential technologies that are going to go mainstream...”

Those exponential technologies are AI, 3D printing and robotics.

The Insight, Part 1: What if you could 3D print furniture while you waited? After working with my CTO and team for several months, we discovered you could do it. Our highpoint was when we opened a pop-up store in New York City’s, Times Square. We got a lot of attention and customers, but we gained something even more invaluable.

The Insight, Part 2: We saw all different types of people walk in, requesting to print different types of things way beyond just furniture. Our view of the marketplace changed.

How do you protect it?

Dealing with designers, we dealt with ideas. As a vendor, we understood proprietary concerns. The problem: in the Cloud era, how would we operate in a secure way? Blockchain and AI fortunately emerged. With blockchain, we recognized we could do what the movie and music industries did when their business digitized -- create digital rights management through encryption . The insight: Blockchain was a technology platform to deliver on our goal of 3D printing on a far-reaching industrial scale. We could realize our vision of creating a cloud-based service that prints, pays and protects.

Size matters

We’ve done 3D printing for unique furniture and home décor applications, and intentionally modest runs for interior designers. During this time, the size of industrial printers and the speed of innovation grew exponentially. The Insight: What if we flipped the paradigm and did 3D printing on an industrial scale for industrial partners? The Problem: How do we house that? Kabuni is now opening a new 36,000 sq. ft. additive manufacturing facility to house some of the world’s best industrial 3D printers

Get good people

The Problem: This is new territory for us. The Insight: Get quality people who not only know how to do it, but have worked in the space. We’re very fortunate to attract a new board who’s executed on all our required disciplines: supply chain, 3D industrial printing, IP protection and the payment gateway space. I’d like to welcome aboard Jeff Booth, Tim Weber, John Hornick and Shannon Susko, respectively.

And I invite you to follow Kabuni as we follow down our exciting path.