Our Story

Seurat Technologies is an advanced metal contract manufacturer that provides serial production of high-volume, industrial-scale parts using its proprietary Area Printing® technology. The idea for Seurat began in 2009, when co-founder James DeMuth joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility to help design a fusion power plant. The facility’s lasers deliver roughly a thousand times more power than the entire United States uses at any instant, and a power plant would need to fire them sixteen times a second. To survive the heat and fatigue of that pace, the reactor’s chamber needed a specialized alloy that couldn’t be welded but could be 3D printed.

The problem was that the metal 3D printers of the time couldn’t do it, and today’s still can’t. The process was too slow: a single printer would take nearly two centuries to make just one fusion chamber. A fundamentally different approach was necessary.

In conventional metal additive manufacturing, print speed and resolution are tightly coupled. Printing faster costs resolution, and adding more lasers brings diminishing returns. The inspiration for breaking that link came from inside Livermore, from a device called an Optically Addressable Light Valve (OALV) that was built to protect the facility’s optics by blocking points of light from hitting tiny lens defects. James and his colleagues realized that a device able to block light at a few points might be able to pattern an entire beam into roughly a million independently controlled points. The OALV itself had to survive a laser powerful enough to melt metal, and in May 2015, after years of development, it did.

James DeMuth and Erik Toomre founded Seurat in 2015 to turn that achievement into a company. By decoupling speed from resolution, Seurat gives additive manufacturing a path to compete with traditional manufacturing at scale. In doing so, it is building a future that is better for people and the planet.

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LEADER IN DECARBONIZATION

Via ISO 14064 guidelines, Seurat has validated our carbon displacement projections:

Up to 100M tons by 2035.

LOCALIZED
MANUFACTURING

All US manufacturing happens in our Wilmington MA facilty (Just north of Boston).

Local print depots will be built around the globe.

ENGAGEMENT MODEL

All parts are qualified via our APP Program before ramping up for production.

DEFENSIBLE INNOVATION

325 patents granted or pending worldwide.

Drawing inspiration from Georges Seurat

By applying thousands of tiny spots of pure color, French painter Georges Seurat fathered a new style of painting: pointillism. The method essentially allows a viewer's visual perception to assemble broader tones, subjects, and themes from thousands of smaller brush strokes—woven together to form masterpieces on a single canvas. From afar, the works appear painted the same way techniques devised before them had done for centuries. Up close, however, one sees the genius in the composition of seemingly endless points serving a much greater whole.

Like Georges Seurat's brush technique, Seurat Technologies applies the same basic principle to laser light and powdered materials. Unlike traditional additive manufacturing, Area Printing from Seurat uses a powerful laser containing over 2.3 million pixels—like brush strokes—to micro-weld thin metal powder layers to the area below it, manufacturing entire renderings at once in a single defined area. Area Printing connects the dots to give the world a new perspective.

THE STORY BEHIND OUR NAME