“I have a plan for 2050,” Dr. Arun Jeldi told me, “for how Velo3D can keep growing through that time, and longer. I want Velo3D to be a century-old company someday.”

In an industry where sometimes it seems downright impossible to guess what’s going to happen the next quarter, that’s quite a statement. But the way the CEO said it, I believed him.

I’d just interviewed Jeldi and three other leaders from Velo3D the week prior to get an in-depth grasp on how the company has pivoted since Jeldi took hold of the company’s reins at the beginning of 2025. Both prior to and during the interview, the other members of the Velo team urged me to speak to Jeldi one-on-one.

Velo3D helps create space technology.

Very early on in our conversation, I saw why they’d pushed for that: the guy’s compelling. Again, no one can really say, at this point, how quickly the additive manufacturing (AM) industry will grow in the long run, and that makes it rather difficult to guess how successful any given company will be. However, I do think that the perspective Jeldi brings to the table is good for Velo3D, and it might just be exactly what the metal AM market needs right now:

“I have a strategy,” Jeldi asserted at the beginning of our interview. “From day one when I stepped into manufacturing, my idea was to build an ecosystem of various hubs for the larger supply chains that I viewed as target markets. So I saw my mission as creating a vertically integrated network of companies, from traditional manufacturing to AM.”

Jeldi, whose background is originally in health care, started to invest in that portfolio of manufacturing companies in 2021 with Lite Magnesium Products, which manufactures magnesium parts for various sectors, including aerospace and defense. In 2023, he acquired Crown Magnesium, which extracts the element from ore, and founded Arrayed Additive, which develops AM applications for aluminum and magnesium parts.

As I noted in the previous interview with the Velo3D team, it was as part of Arrayed Additive that Jeldi first encountered Velo — as a customer. Jeldi was so impressed with the company that, when he found out later that year that Velo3D was open to being acquired, he jumped at the opportunity, ultimately taking a big stake in a debt-for-equity swap.

The potential synergies between Velo3D and the other companies in Dr. Jeldi’s portfolio are particularly intriguing in a context where reshoring continues to be highlighted as a priority by U.S. policymakers and major corporations: perhaps above all, by the Department of Defense (DoD), one of Velo3D’s most important customers. Velo3D was the first large-format metal AM OEM to prioritize manufacturing its machines in the U.S. But true resilience must take into account every link in a given supply chain, and that’s precisely what Jeldi has his sights on:

“I don’t believe in setting limitations for what we can do, which is why I view all the companies in my portfolio as hubs in a broader ecosystem. This is most important in the strategically critical sectors that Velo3D excels at servicing, whether it’s space/defense/aerospace, or semiconductor equipment.

“But you can’t start with the machines. When you’re trying to build that sort of manufacturing network, the first thing you have to look at is your feedstock. If you want to increase the gross margins and net profits of a manufacturing company, that all depends on your raw material costs.”

Velo3D Sapphire 3D printer.

For Jeldi, that rationale yields two related key angles from which to approach market penetration. First, you have to figure out a way to lower feedstock costs. In addition to Velo3D’s synergy with Crown Magnesium, this explains why the company has struck deals, including the five-year supply contract with Amaero International for refractory metals and titanium alloys. Those sorts of strategic partnerships enable Velo3D to get advanced work done on developing applications, ultimately lowering the costs for the end-user. (This is also the principle underlying the company’s Rapid Production Solutions (RPS) business model, wherein Velo3D develops applications in collaboration with customers and then prints the relevant parts with its own manufacturing capacity.)

Refractory alloy powders. Image courtesy of Amaero.

The other angle entails sticking to the application classes where the higher cost of AM is less of an issue:

“Aerospace companies don’t make a million planes per year,” Jeldi pointed out. “They make more like hundreds. That’s a perfect output level for additive. And they tend to have much higher-value, much more complex parts than the automotive industry, for instance.

“If aerospace parts can often cost $20,000, whereas automotive parts cost more like $200, you obviously want to use your print capacity for the aerospace part. Plus there are also the national security implications which matter much more for sectors like aerospace and defense, and semiconductor equipment, that give greater incentives to customers in those verticals to pay more for parts with lower lead times, which are produced domestically, or by strategic allies.

“And you can actually quantify that demand: the U.S. defense budget is 800-billion dollars plus, and there’s a real need for stockpiling of missiles, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and for producing more parts for airplanes and helicopters, which cost millions of dollars, and for submarines, which cost billions. AM excels at those sorts of applications, and the output level and the cost per part are in alignment.

I think it’s the same thing in a large-format, metal context that we’ve seen happen with smaller polymer parts in dental and medical: the polymer OEMs that have succeeded are the ones that have developed applications for those markets.”

In terms of the new Velo3D business model, everything Dr. Jeldi thinks about is how the barrier-to-entry can be lowered to the point where a new market can be established. This is vital in an industry in which customers and suppliers are far more like partners than is the case in the manufacturing sector at-large. Maybe that will change at a later phase in the AM industry’s history, but for now, everyone involved in every application does the best when they’re working as a cohesive unit:

“With RPS, we’re proving the value of our systems to customers, at the production level, before they even have to buy their own machine,” explained Jeldi. “That’s how you create demand, because once you’ve proven out the technology, and you’ve created the market for the application, the customer will come back again and again.

“If you sell the machine before the customer has created value with a proven application, it might never lead to a market for what they’re trying to produce, or if it does, it happens much more slowly. So RPS isn’t a replacement for selling machines, but in fact a way to get to the point where customers are buying multiple machines at a faster pace than would be possible otherwise.

I believe in reoccurring revenue models — I never want to sell anyone just one thing, one time. That was the catalyst behind RPS. With RPS, we’re reducing the barrier-to-entry, increasing the demand for our technology ourselves, and focusing on producing the most valuable parts that are most in-demand by the most customers. It enables customers to grow into their AM capabilities at a pace that ensures profitability, rather than committing to all the investment upfront for parts that they’re not yet certain about the demand for.”

The pivot is working so far. Velo3D has continued to make strides with the verticals at the heart of its wheelhouse. Indeed, just a couple of days before I sat down to write this article, Velo3D announced that the company had struck a deal with the U.S. Navy to qualify CuNi parts for the Maritime Industrial Base (MIB) program, in a contract valued at $6 million.

All of this means that Dr. Jeldi should be busy for the foreseeable future, and that seems to be how he likes it. When I started the call with him for the interview, he mentioned he was in Florida, and I asked him if he was there on business or for vacation.

He laughed: “No. There is no vacation for me, not for at least a few years.”

Unless otherwise noted, images courtesy of Velo3D