July 7, 2022 Wikifactory Launches Manufacturing Marketplace

The marketplace will help designers and businesses to build long term reputation profiles and provide SaaS workflow tools.

• The new Collaborative Manufacturing Marketplace brings together the company’s cloud CAD, PDM and PLM solutions to directly interface with an online manufacturing marketplace, as a first step in making it possible for anyone, anywhere to start and scale a hardware or product design company.
• The new offering enables users to upload their designs, request and receive a quote from quality-assured manufacturers, obtain Design-for-Manufacturing feedback to iterate their designs, and have their product delivered to their door, all without leaving the Wikifactory platform.
• The marketplace will help designers and businesses to build long term reputation profiles and provide SaaS workflow tools to facilitate actions around longer term product development projects.

London, UK: Wikifactory, an online platform for collaboratively creating physical products, has today announced the launch of its new quality-assured Collaborative Manufacturing Marketplace, for on-demand manufacturing. The offering will be available across Europe, Asia, and the US for part production with digital manufacturing technologies, including 3D printing, CNC machining, Sheet Metal Fabrication and Injection Moulding.

For product designers and companies, achieving first time yield is risky, time-consuming and complicated due to the number of manufacturers available in the network and navigating whom to trust. To make the process easier and help users bring their product to market faster, through the Manufacturing Marketplace, Wikifactory will discuss and help plan the developer’s production together with their carefully selected team of manufacturers around the CAD design. The offering has been developed in response to the supply chain crises persisting and interest from product developers for local manufacturing emerging.

The marketplace was soft launched earlier this year in order to test the user experience and ensure the company was providing a service that will go above and beyond the product designer’s needs. Now, without leaving the platform, users can:

• Request a quote: The user will simply need to upload the parts they require to configure their quote request within minutes.
• Get a quote within 24 hours: Wikifactory will evaluate the RFQ and send it to the best manufacturers for the individual’s needs and they will receive a quote within 24 hours.
• Assess manufacturers: Once the user has received the quotes, they can access the manufacturers based on the fabrication services they offer, materials they work with, industries they work for, and certificates they hold.
• Receive the parts straight to their doorstep: Once the order has been placed and a quality inspection has been conducted, the manufacturer sends the part directly to the user.

This new tool comes after Wikifactory launched the CAD Rooms in December 2021. The CAD Rooms remedies the complicated process of reviewing CAD files and then sharing or receiving feedback via emails with annotated screenshots. Through CAD Rooms, users can securely view, share, and collaborate on CAD files in a real-time environment that makes collaboration around 3D files easy, with chat and annotation features.

Joel Tortolero, CEO, Wikifactory, said: “We are focused on looking for ways to make collaboration in manufacturing as easy and cost-effective as possible because this will mean more sustainable production in the long-run. When it comes to product development, designers are usually left at the door of MAAS providers because they don’t have the skills or knowledge and the manufacturer doesn’t have a direct way of communicating with their client. Our Collaborative Manufacturing Marketplace addresses these gaps and helps the developer throughout their journey from design to production.

“The Manufacturing Marketplace is the integration of years’ worth of core tech development, product and user engagement into a solution that responds to the needs highlighted by COVID 19. The need for virtual collaboration and online manufacturing is here to stay.”

By enabling product designers to iterate an idea and take it right through to production with local manufacturers, the platform is not only helping to cut carbon emissions associated with global deliveries, but cutting costs associated with product development whilst speeding up the process. The marketplace allows users to know they’re finding the best parts at the most competitive price.

Tortolero continued: “It’s important that we bridge the technology gap not only within big companies, but for SMEs and startups to rapidly adopt their online and agile solutions to be more nimble against the world’s current fragile supply chain, and become more sustainable as a result.”

Wikifactory enables users from across the globe to collaborate, prototype and produce hardware solutions in real-time that solve real world problems. The company recently announced news that it secured $2.5M in Pre-Series A funding from current shareholders and new investors, bringing its total to nearly $8 million. The investment has enabled Wikifactory to further develop and officially launch the Collaborative Manufacturing Marketplace.

More than 140,000 product developers and engineers are already using the Wikifactory platform to build over 9,000 products including robotics, electric vehicles, drones, agri-tech, sustainable energy appliances, lab equipment, 3D printers, smart furniture and biotech fashion materials, as well as medical devices.

About Wikifactory
Inspired by the workflows of agile and open source software development, Wikifactory is the world’s first online collaborative manufacturing platform to design, prototype and manufacture physical things in virtual spaces. The manufacturing marketplace offers the capability for rapid prototyping and serial manufacturing of parts using CNC machining, sheet metal, 3D printing and injection moulding with online quotes in 24 hours. This adds to the Company’s 3D CAD tool, which is compatible with over 30 file formats and enables real time collaboration between engineers, designers, clients and manufacturers.

Wikifactory’s documentation system, version control drive, and feedback system make the platform an all-in-one space for design through to production. But it doesn’t stop there. Wikifactory’s community meets in a sophisticated and intuitive web publishing tool to post blogs, encourage likes, views, shares, debates in forums and connect with other active members. Adopted by designers, engineers, makers, academia, hardware startups and enterprise, our global community is making thousands of valuable products that solve real-world problems.

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