Formlabs Management Shuffle: Chairman Exits as Former Apple Executive Joins Board

Formlabs is going through a management reshuffle. Co-founder Natan Liner is leaving the Chairman role and moving to an advisor position. At the same time, the company has brought in Dan Riccio, Apple's former Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, as a strategic advisor. The moves point to a company trying to professionalize its leadership structure as it scales.

What is changing at the top

Liner was instrumental in Formlabs' early days and helped build the company from a Kickstarter-era startup into the world's largest supplier of professional SLA and SLS systems. His shift to advisor is not a hostile exit. The 3DPrint.com reporting frames it as a natural evolution: Formlabs is adding more outside board members as it matures, and Liner's role is shifting away from day-to-day governance.

Riccio's arrival is the bigger signal. He spent 26 years at Apple, overseeing hardware engineering for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch lines. Formlabs says he will advise on product development, design rigor, and operational scaling as the company expands its industrial and professional 3D printing footprint.

The broader context

Formlabs also brought in Rob Willett, former Cognex CEO, earlier in 2026 to serve as Chief Executive Officer. Willett has more than 30 years in industrial automation and machine vision. Stacking those hires together, the board is building a leadership team with deep experience in mass-market hardware and industrial systems.

The timing matters. Formlabs is pushing hard on the Fuse 1 SLS platform and expanding into higher-volume industrial applications. That requires supply chain discipline, global operations, and product development processes that a software-driven startup culture does not always prioritize. Riccio and Willett are both known for exactly those skills.

What to watch

This is not a crisis reshuffle. There is no CEO departure or board revolt. The risk for Formlabs is cultural: bringing in outside executives can slow decision-making or dilute the scrappy product instinct that made the Form 1 successful. The opportunity is that professional manufacturing leadership is what Formlabs needs if it wants to move from prosumer favorite to serious industrial supplier.

For now, the signal is clear. Formlabs is building a more conventional corporate structure. Whether that leads to faster growth or slower innovation will show up in the next couple of product cycles.