Cubicure: EIC Accelerator Grant for 3D Printing, and What Followed

Cubicure, a spin-off of the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), 3D prints plastic parts from resins too thick for ordinary light-curing printers. Its patented process heats the resin and spreads each layer with a coating mechanism, so it can cure highly viscous, high-performance photopolymers into tough, temperature-resistant parts. It calls the process Hot Lithography.

In the European Commission's 3 April 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of the EIC Accelerator, Cubicure and the German parts maker F. & G. Hachtel won a joint grant to turn Hot Lithography into a service for industrial spare parts. The Commission's list of selected companies names both, Cubicure in Vienna and Hachtel in Aalen, under the same project. The EU contributed €1,792,388.50 to a €2,560,555 project, of which Cubicure's share was €821,100, according to CORDIS. Four and a half years later, the US clear aligner maker Align Technology bought the company.

Where Cubicure Stands Now

Cubicure is a subsidiary of Align Technology, the Nasdaq-listed maker of Invisalign aligners. Align agreed the purchase in September 2023 for about €79 million, according to TCT Magazine and 3DPrint.com. Align completed the acquisition on 2 January 2024, its quarterly report to the SEC states. The filing puts the total consideration at $85.794 million: $80.142 million in cash to Cubicure's shareholders, $7.968 million for the 9.04% stake Align had bought in 2021, less $2.316 million of payables Align owed Cubicure under earlier agreements. The Vienna start-up news site Trending Topics reported the same €79 million and the same closing date.

The Austrian company register shows Align Technology Switzerland GmbH and Align Holding GmbH as the only shareholders since 5 January 2024, and annual accounts filed every year up to October 2026, according to the state register portal EVI. North Data records that the fund of AM Ventures, the Munich additive manufacturing investor, left the shareholder register in January 2024. The two register sources disagree on the management: EVI lists co-founder Robert Gmeiner, Ahmet Efe Cataltepe and James Edward Tandy as managing directors, while North Data lists Tandy, Cataltepe and Karen Elaine Silva and records co-founder Jürgen Stampfl's removal in January 2024. The filed accounts are not free to read, so revenue, losses and staff numbers since the takeover could not be verified.

The company still sells to outside customers under its own name. Its news page lists trade fair appearances in June and July 2026 at 3D PRINT in Lyon, EPHJ in Switzerland and a connector congress in Würzburg, and still offers both printers and a range of resins. In July 2026 the EU signed TEAM, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie doctoral network on resin 3D printing coordinated by the Université de Haute-Alsace, in which Cubicure is an associated partner without EU funding, according to CORDIS.

The Technology: Heat Instead of Thin Resin

Stereolithography cures a liquid photopolymer layer by layer with light and gives high precision and smooth surfaces. CORDIS says no polymer 3D printing process on the market had combined low cost with the material quality industry needs. Cubicure's answer is to heat the resin and apply each layer with a coating mechanism, at up to 120°C according to the announcement of its TÜV Austria process certificate, so it can use high-molecular, very viscous resins and keep "the high precision and surface quality of lithographic methods", in the words of the CORDIS report. The prototyping and parts maker 1zu1, a user of the process, describes the process as combining the advantages of stereolithography and selective laser sintering, according to polyformnext. The intellectual property was developed at TU Wien over several years before the company was founded in March 2015, according to an interview published by Advantage Austria. Its first industrial printer, the Caligma 200, came out in 2017, and the company held "more than 15 significant international patent families", according to EY Austria, which named Gmeiner a winner of its Entrepreneur of the Year award in the start-up category.

The EU project was meant to prove the process in a market where polymer 3D printing had a cost and quality problem: spare parts for trains, machines and vehicles whose original suppliers no longer make them. Hachtel was to be the first industrial user and to offer the whole chain, from digitising an old part to printing it and checking it with industrial computed tomography. CORDIS names Siemens and Deutsche Bahn as examples of buyers looking for such suppliers.

What the EU Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The grant agreement was signed on 24 July 2019, and the project ran from 1 August 2019 to 31 December 2021, according to CORDIS. Hachtel coordinated it. The partners' final periodic report, which covers the period to 31 December 2021, lists four new resins: Evolution FR, described as the first UL94 V0-rated photopolymer; a flame-retardant version of the ThermoBlast high-temperature material, rated for up to 300°C; Evolution HI, for parts under repeated stress; and an elastomer sold as INFINAM FL 6300 L. It says the Caligma printer was brought to market readiness and used by first customers for small series, and that the larger Cerion production printer was launched in November 2021.

The Cerion launch is confirmed independently. 3D Printing Industry reported from the Formnext trade fair in November 2021 that the machine had a build volume of 1,000 by 280 by 300 mm and printed each full layer in under 90 seconds regardless of the number of parts. The TÜV Austria audit took place in the fourth quarter of 2020, according to the certificate announcement and the CORDIS report. The CORDIS results page lists three peer-reviewed papers on Hot Lithography resins co-written with TU Wien, six Cubicure patent applications and trademark filings for Caligma and Cerion.

The commercial side is thinner. The report says pilot projects supplied spare parts "e.g. for German and Swiss railway companies" and that "first customers were won", without naming any. The project website did name three: its archived showcase pages list Deutsche Bahn and Swiss Federal Railways as customers for spare parts printed in Evolution FR in 2020, and a May 2021 case study calls the pipe inspection robot maker IBAK Helmut Hunger a customer for the series production of a cleaning nozzle. The project website is the only source for these names. The proposal expected "70 additional jobs and an additional turnover of 13.4M€ until 2023 at both SMEs". Neither company has published job or turnover figures that would show whether that target was met. Hachtel still offers parts made by Hot Lithography on its website, with no figures for that business.

1. New high-performance resinsDeliveredFour materials in the final report; Evolution and ThermoBlast still sold on cubicure.com.
2. Caligma ready for small seriesDeliveredOn sale, per the report and EY Austria.
3. Scalable production printerDeliveredCerion shown at Formnext, November 2021.
4. Certified processDeliveredTÜV Austria audit, fourth quarter of 2020.
5. Spare parts service with industrial customersPartlyDeutsche Bahn, Swiss Federal Railways and IBAK named as customers, only on the archived project website; no volumes or contracts.
6. 70 jobs and €13.4M added turnover by 2023Not shownNo figures published by either partner.

From Spare Parts to Dental Devices

The buyer that mattered was not a railway. Align disclosed in its SEC filing that it had signed joint development and technology licence agreements with Cubicure in 2021, the year it took its 9.04% stake, while the EU project was still running. Align's chief executive Joe Hogan said the partnership "began several years ago as a joint development program", according to 3DPrint.com.

Align makes aligners by thermoforming plastic sheets over 3D printed moulds. Cubicure's process is meant to print the devices directly. Align's annual report for 2025 says Cubicure provides "direct fabrication capabilities" that should eventually let it "print millions of custom devices per day", that it has "begun limited manufacturing of certain appliances already", and that it expects to pilot further devices, "including retainers and certain pre-fab attachments, in limited releases in 2026". In a June 2024 interview with Additive Manufacturing, Align's head of product research and development, Srini Kaza, said Align would support Cubicure's existing partners, but that "the big opportunity immediately in front of us" was Align's own mass-produced products.

Align's first direct 3D printed device, the Invisalign Palatal Expander, was cleared by the US FDA in December 2023, before the takeover closed, according to the same annual report. Align does not say which printing process makes it, so this article does not credit it to Cubicure.

The price allocation shows what Align was buying. Of the $85.794 million, $47.0 million was assigned to developed technology, to be written off over 13 years, and $47.673 million to goodwill, all of it allocated to Align's clear aligner unit. Property and equipment were valued at $0.975 million. Align recorded a pre-tax gain of $4.1 million on revaluing its earlier 9.04% stake.

Why It Matters for Europe

The European Commission counts advanced materials among its key enabling technologies, and its February 2024 communication on Advanced Materials for Industrial Leadership calls for faster industrial uptake and more manufacturing capacity in Europe. Cubicure is a clear case of European research reaching industrial use: the process came out of TU Wien, the EU co-funded its step to market, and the company still develops and sells from Vienna. It is also a case of where such companies end up. The control of the patents and of the roadmap now sits with a company based in the United States, whose stated priority is its own dental products. Spare parts for European railways and machines, the use the EU grant was written for, have no published numbers.

The Verdict

This article is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout. Cubicure, Align Technology and Hachtel were not asked for comment.