By: Natalie Johnson
James DeMuth had no intention of reinventing manufacturing.
DeMuth, a Fusion Energy Engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, was on a team responsible for designing a fusion chamber that could contain the same nuclear fusion reaction that powers the sun.
The problem? It would have taken two centuries to print those parts using existing 3D methods.
The problem inspired James and his co-founders to understand and remove the barrier to scaling 3D metal printing. The outcome was Area Printing(R) – a revolutionary metal-forming technology that prints parts by embedding a high-powered laser with pixelated images of exactly what “area” needs to be melted to create a part. The size of the laser pulse that melts the powder is 10,000 times larger than conventional high definition 3D metal printing. What began as a way to salvage a faltering fusion project, has now become a disruptive technology that can transform and reshore metal parts manufacturing.
Central to that change is DeMuth’s vision: to break free from the confines of the factory as we know it and to bring a software-based, laser-powered approach to how we make metal parts. DeMuth took that idea and turned it up to 11. With Area Printing, each layer of metal powder is bonded together with refined precision, offering a speed and scale of casting combined with the versatility and precision of 3D printing.
There’s nothing incremental about this improvement. It is a complete shift in how and where we manufacture metal parts.
This technological leap has implications so profound, that by unlocking the ability to make high-quality, high-volume metal parts on demand, DeMuth is giving manufacturers something they haven’t had in the past: agility at industrial scale.
The applications are limitless. Aerospace parts, electric vehicle components, clean energy infrastructure and national defense systems would all be capable of benefiting from rapid, very- flexible manufacturing.
But DeMuth’s dreams stretch much farther. He imagines a distributed network of Area Printing factories: modular, digital-first factories that would ideally be located close to the point of use. Such a network would enable manufacturers to adapt supply to changing needs, decrease reliance on the congested global shipping routes, and localise production with lower emissions. In a world of fragmented supply chains and mounting geopolitical risk, DeMuth’s is strategically enabling the reshoring of manufacturing wherever your shore might be.
The approach also focuses on sustainability. Seurat is running its platform on emissions-free power, an aspect that dovetails with DeMuth’s overarching goal, which is to decarbonize heavy industry. Conventional metal production is among the top contributors of global CO2 emissions. By removing tooling, replacing casting and forging, and by minimizing transportation distances, Area Printing is a fundamentally cleaner way to build.
Investors and industry chiefs have certainly noticed. Seurat has raised close to $200 million in venture financing from NVIDIA, Honda, Porsche SE, GM, Denso, Siemens Energy as well as financial investors like Capricorn and True Ventures.
DeMuth is a believer in the fundamentals. “We’re not doing this just to make things faster,” he often says, “we’re scaling what’s possible.” That clarity of purpose has propelled him from fusion labs to the factory floor, and now into boardrooms and production lines across the globe.
DeMuth named Seurat Technologies after Georges Seurat, the French postimpressionist painter famous for pointillism, his technique of creating images using thousands of dots. The artistic analogy is more than a metaphor. DeMuth’s Area Printing process, like Seurat’s pointillism, builds complete images from millions of pixels. But DeMuth’s medium, of course, is light, not pigment. And in place of canvas, he is constructing in metal powder.
As industries evolve to a future shaped by innovation, speed and flexibility, James DeMuth is demonstrating that the future ready manufacturing industry needs is here today.
