Q&A Series: Mike Kenworthy

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Introduction

We are thrilled to welcome our new CPO, Mike Kenworthy, into the fold. Mike brings a wealth of experience in engineering operations and product development -- particularly in metal Additive Manufacturing. We are excited to share his expert point of view on the industry and what makes Seurat unique.

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Q: Where were you before you joined Seurat?  

A: I was with Divergent Technologies, it's a technology startup that was developing an AM-based production system in Los Angeles. With this transition to Seurat, I moved from Los Angeles to the Massachusetts area. I went to school in the region, so I know it pretty well. Over my career, I kind of gradually moved West and now I've cycled back to the beginning into the Boston area.

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Q: You are moving your family to New Hampshire. What attracted you to the region?  

A: It’s a really great area to raise a family. You get the great school systems that the East Coast is known for, you've got the seasonality, so you get to experience all the different kind of activities that are associated with those seasons. I wanted to give that to my family because in Southern California, but you don't get to experience the seasons.

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Q: What first attracted you to Seurat?

A: Well, I've really been fascinated by the technology for years. I think ever since I came across a press release about the OLV (Optical Light Valve) technology, I remember thinking about it saying that's fundamentally the right way to make a 3D printer.

I think the core element is that it fundamentally allows for scaling of AM to industrially relevant printing rates. Right now, with LPBF we kind of raster these individual beams around the print bed and can produce good-quality material but it's fundamentally slow. A lot of the work I've done in industrializing AM has been focused on scaling that technology up, adding more lasers, increasing layer thicknesses, and anything we could do to print faster. But, one of the things that happens when you do that is you make some compromises. You start decreasing your resolution, you make larger melt pools, and you start to make compromises between quality and printing rate. With Seurat, you don't need to do that. Seurat’s Area Printing® technology allows for the ability to generate fine-resolution features while still scaling and achieving really high printing rates.

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Q: As an expert in the industry, what sets Seurat apart from the competition?

A: Seurat’s approach is all about production scale and delivering these benefits to our customers. We're going to be able to achieve everything that traditional AM has promised, the agility, the rapid iteration, the freedom from design-specific tooling, but do that at scale and with an unprecedented level of quality. That's going to allow our customers to apply all these benefits of digital production and compete head-to-head with traditional metalworking technologies, like casting and forging, while still modernizing their approach and their ability to deliver better products for their customers, evolve their product lines and just fundamentally be more competitive.

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Q: What are the key objectives you want to accomplish in your new role?

A: One of my main objectives in joining the Seurat team is to ensure that we have a really closely coupled commercial and technology road map. The materials road map is also critical. We want to add more materials to our repertoire, deliver those to the market, and realize products with our customers in these different alloy systems that are important to growing their businesses. That's kind of the key objective.

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Q: Why are more materials important?

A: It's more opportunities, not just for us but also for our customers. Engineered systems often involve multiple materials.  We need to be able to produce more elements of those complex systems to deliver the full value of digital production for our customers. Most systems aren't all aluminum or all steel, there's a combination of materials required to deliver the best overall performance of the system. As we add to our portfolio and get more applications under our belt, we're going to improve on what we're able to deliver to the customers - best-in-class material properties with best-in-class economics - there really will be no competition.

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Q: Why will Seurat be able to overcome the headwinds in the industry?  

A: It’s no secret that many AM companies are struggling, or have struggled, to find that product-market fit. I think a lot of this has to do with how the technology evolved. Since it was fundamentally a prototyping technology, they were not intended to be used as production tools but bleeding-edge service bureaus began applying these machines for small-scale production. Seurat’s strategy has always been different. They were always thinking about large-scale production. How are we are going to do series production with this technology and achieve the level of quality that's needed to compete head-to-head with traditional metal working techniques like casting and forging? This isn't prototyping or small series production of just a few units. It's a different set of challenges when you're thinking about serial production versus thinking about just making a prototype.

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Closing thought

This is what we're bringing to our customers -- the unprecedented ability to rapidly iterate and improve designs, using material produced at the highest quality with the best-in-class economics, a fully digital production process that is going to allow for never-before-seen products to be developed and enter the market at scale.

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We hope this interview gave you some insight into Mike and how Seurat is scaling what's possible with Additive Manufacturing.  We continue to search for great people (with and without previous additive manufacturing experience) to join our team.  To see our latest career opportunities, please click here:  https://www.seurat.com/life-at-seurat