February 2025

Last month I mentioned, in the PS, that we’d added partial order shipments and showed off some screens from the mobile app to prove it. This month I’ve got more mobile app things to show off on both Flows and Threads

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We noticed a while ago that most Threads signups were based on mobile and the tool wasn’t particularly easy to use on smaller screens. So our new frontend whizz, Olha (the second person we’ve been able to hire under the Ukrainian visa scheme!), made some updates to change that.

There’s still work to be done (is there ever not?) but it’s so cool to see somebody new tackling something that has become a real problem and we just didn’t have the time to before. Plus, I’m confident that we’ll do that extra work, because I’ve seen how we get back to things we started somewhere else this month, in the Materials Management side of Flows.​

One is a significant expansion of Materials Management is the Permanent Container concept (as opposed to the temporary containers powder is usually delivered in). This is something we introduced last year, but the array of actions that could be associated with these Containers was limited. Now we’re changing that. We can now load more cannisters into the containers, test, sieve or load those containers into machines (with partial loads), etc. All these actions occur – you guessed it – in the mobile app too. 

So, lots of action and actions happening in the Mobile App. That’s an interesting trend I didn’t recognize before writing this. It’s not surprising in the general scheme of things – people expect more action from the mobile and many of our operators are mobile on the shop floor – but it’s still and interesting trend. 

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But even beyond additive, the team is doing incredible things. No better way to show that than our press release with Autodesk this month, demonstrating our integration with their Industry Cloud. This is a major milestone as Autodesk has now made the individual functions previously only available through their monolithic systems addressable via standard APIs. Things like nesting, orientation, watertight checks, file conversion, geometry changes. 

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This feeds directly into where we thought the software world would move long ago. We’ve seen remarkable progress in nesting, for example, from relatively small teams. These teams develop new approaches that deliver outsized performance returns, in part due to their specific focus. However, these were previously difficult and expensive to deploy because customers were unwilling to learn new tools, sign new agreements with new suppliers and deal with IT. Startups also struggled because they had to develop their own interfaces, and market their solutions separately, both of which can be very expensive. A much better solution is the ability to tie dozens of such applications together for users to access through a common, independent (workflow) interface. 

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This is what Authentise has built. We’ve already got more than 20 different algorithms integrated. Our job is to make processes easy and painless for users, allowing them to capture all the data and access best in class algorithms. This was made challenging because companies like Autodesk wouldn’t share individual algorithms but only monolithic tools. But the new API cloud, of which we’re the first user in the additive industry, changes that. Autodesk has now provided 7,000 endpoints for different functionalities. That’s 7,000 ways startups can compete with them. That’s a remarkable opportunity – and we’re delighted to give them a platform to do so on.

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Do you agree? Let’s continue the conversation in person, and maybe I can show you the latest updates too. We’ll be at AMUG, Rapid, and possibly at the Berlin AM Conference over the next few weeks. Let me know if you will, too.