Founder (CEO) - Metal Additive Manufacturing Venture

Who We Are

ATUM is a Singapore deep-tech venture builder and investor. We build companies from breakthrough, IP-backed research, bringing capital, operational muscle, and partners from industry, VC, and government into every build. We've built and backed 15 ventures, and we invest in fast-scaling deep-tech with real fundamentals, not hype.

The Venture

Metal 3D printing forces a brutal trade-off. Powder-bed systems give you precision, but with hazardous metal powder, inert-gas handling, heavy capex, and punishing post-processing. Wire and deposition systems skip the powder but can't hold fine features or surface finish. For small, high-precision, geometrically complex metal parts, there's no clean option.

We're building the company to change that.

The core is a powder-free metal 3D printing platform, developed at NTU, that builds fully dense parts straight from sheet metal, no powder, no inert chamber for steel, a compact footprint, and simple operation, while hitting feature sizes and surface finish that powder-free processes have never reached. Internal channels, fully enclosed cavities, and overhangs that incumbent processes can't produce cleanly.

The technology is real and already in the market: paid pilots with hospitals, automation players, and heat-exchanger OEMs, multiple proof-of-concept builds, and a beta machine shipping in 2026. It's backed by Singapore's national additive manufacturing programme and a strategic manufacturing partner taking it from prototype to commercial-grade system.

This is a hardware-led, capital-equipment company, with machine sales plus high-margin consumables and service, selling into R&D labs first, then heat-exchanger and biomedical manufacturers. A long game, with a defensible technical position and a clear path to category leadership.

The Role

You'll be the founding commercial CEO. You'll own commercial strategy, go-to-market, fundraising, and building the company into a real business, alongside a strong technical founding team and the inventor, backed by a dedicated ATUM venture team and a strategic manufacturing partner.

Together, we'll:

• Turn paid pilots and LOIs into repeatable machine sales and a real install base
• Shape the business model and pricing across machines, consumables, and service
• Drive the move from the R&D-lab beachhead into the higher-value heat-exchanger and biomedical markets
• Raise pre-seed and seed capital, and build out the founding team
• Take the product from beta to deployed, revenue-generating systems at scale

This is not a job. It's a founding journey where you share the risk, the upside, and the impact.

Requirements

Who You Are

• Capital-equipment operator: You've built, sold, or scaled industrial machines, instruments, or hardware into manufacturers, R&D labs, or medical-device buyers. You know how the capex sale actually works: long cycles, technical buyers, and the service and consumables that make the economics.
• Advanced-manufacturing-fluent: Background in additive manufacturing, precision equipment, industrial automation, or a comparable hardware domain. You don't need to be the technologist, you need to sell to one and earn their trust.
• Field-tested: You've been on the factory floor, in the lab, across the table from engineering and procurement. You turn real-world pain into commercial traction.
• Commercially sharp: You think in unit economics, sales cycles, and razor-and-blade models, and you can lead a deep technical team without deferring to them.
• A builder, not a passenger: You self-start, run at ambiguity, and own outcomes. You don't wait to be told what to do next.
• Resilient & ready: You have the runway to commit full-time, and you know building hardware in a real industry takes grit and patience.

Benefits

Why Build With Us

• A validated starting point: Real technology, paying pilots, a beta machine, and a manufacturing partner, not a blank page.
• Founder-led: You're the CEO, with meaningful founding equity in a cap table built to back you.
• Funding-ready: ATUM and a strategic co-investor back the build with pre-seed capital and grant access, plus follow-on funding from our additive-manufacturing investor network.
• Hands-on partners: We're in the trenches with you on product, GTM, and fundraising, not just on the cap table.
• Domain access: Labs, technical experts, early adopters, supply-chain partners, and a national AM ecosystem already engaged.