9T Labs

9T Labs was founded in 2018 as a spin-off from ETH Zurich by Martin Eichenhofer, Chester Houwink and Giovanni Cavolina, with a thesis that continuous-carbon-fiber composites — the material of choice for the highest-performance parts in aerospace, medical and sporting goods — were locked behind slow, tooling-heavy manual layup. The company's answer was to make composites as accessible as metals by printing them. Rather than chase consumer or prototyping markets, 9T Labs aimed at series production of structural parts, betting that engineers wanted the strength-to-weight of carbon fiber without the cost and lead time of traditional composite manufacturing.

9T Labs' production platform, the Red Series, combined three pieces: an additive printhead that deposited continuous carbon fiber and polymer into a near-net-shape preform, a Fusion compression-molding module that consolidated the preform into a dense, void-free part, and Fibrify design software that let engineers place fiber along a part's specific load paths. The pitch was parts up to roughly twice as strong as titanium and far lighter, produced without traditional layup tooling. It was one of the most technically credible attempts to industrialize continuous-fiber 3D printing, and it attracted attention from established additive players — Stratasys was among the backers.

9T Labs raised roughly $21.5 million in total — a seed round followed by a $17 million Series A announced in early 2022 — to move the Red Series from a working platform toward volume adoption. That capital was never enough to bridge the gap to a market that was slower to standardize on composite AM than the company had projected. Structural composite parts have long qualification cycles in aerospace and medical, and the sporting-goods volumes that could have carried the business did not materialize at scale fast enough. The company burned through its runway before reaching self-sustaining revenue.

On November 3, 2025, the District Court of Zurich opened bankruptcy proceedings against 9T Labs AG, and the company was placed into liquidation. Swiss precision manufacturer Biwi SA, based in Glovelier, acquired the assets out of bankruptcy — including roughly 40 machines and the patent portfolio — and relaunched the platform under the brand Neocarb, presenting it publicly for the first time at Watches and Wonders 2026. Biwi's leadership framed the failure squarely: 9T Labs 'did not fail because of a defective technology but because it was ahead of a still immature market.' The rescue kept the IP and the machine fleet alive in Switzerland, with Biwi planning a dedicated technology center in Glovelier by 2027.