Glowforge reinvents homemade by printing leather satchels, cardboard lamps, and chocolate rockets

SEATTLE--Glowforge ended its 30­day crowdfunding campaign on Saturday, October 24th with a total of $27,907,995 in pre­orders for its 3D laser printer. With this, Glowforge became the biggest fixed­length crowdfunding campaign in history. The previous record was held on Kickstarter, where the Pebble smartwatch netted $20,338,986 earlier this year. Although Glowforges campaign is over, pre­orders can still be placed on http://glowforge.com.

Glowforge had previously raised $9,000,000 in investment from Foundry Group and True Ventures, so its initial goal was a modest $100,000 ­ just enough to place the first factory order. This goal was met within two hours. The company received its first $1,000,000 in pre­orders just 14 hours after launch. For the next two weeks, educators, engineers, designers, and artisans snapped up an average of $400,000 of Glowforges per day. As the end of the campaign neared, things began to quicken; backers placed $14,000,000 in pre­orders during the last five days. On the last day, the pace of pre­orders exceeded one Glowforge every twenty seconds.

While some had questioned the publics interest in personal 3D printers and the largest prior campaign raising $3.5M, Glowforges new record put those doubts to rest. By expanding printable materials to leather, wood, acrylic, cardboard, fabric, paper, and even sushi, Glowforge is the first time home fabrication technology has caught the eye of the mass market.

"We set out to build a tool that a small community of designers and engineers would fall in love with. What we found was something far more profound: a world of artists, hobbyists, entrepreneurs, and crafters who had been overlooked by modern technology companies. They brought ideas to us that wed never dreamed of: printing mountain rescue kits, miniature biospheres, and even leather plague masks for Halloween," said Glowforge CEO and cofounder, Dan Shapiro. "We did not launch this to set records, and we were amazed when the records started to fall. The immense wave of support weve received in these past 30 days means the stakes are higher, but we cant wait to start delivering."

Glowforge plans to ship the first units in December, with the bulk of pre­ordered units in the first half of 2016. International shipping is available to more than 100 countries and pre­orders can still be placed at http://glowforge.com/.

About Glowforge
Glowforge is a Seattle­based startup that makes a 3D laser printer. Glowforge's wireless desktop laser makes it simple for designers and engineers to take products directly from digital design to reality. Unlike 3D printers that build objects out of plastic, Glowforge uses lasers to print products out of durable and beautiful materials like wood, leather, acrylic, paper and fabric. Leveraging advanced software stored in the cloud instead of expensive hardware, Glowforge is both affordable and easy to use. For more information, please visit http://glowforge.com/.