Impossible Objects Raises $40M to Scale Carbon Fiber 3D Printing

Impossible Objects, the Chicago company that builds 3D printers using carbon fiber and fiberglass, just closed a $40 million Series B round. The money is aimed squarely at scaling its Composite Based Additive Manufacturing, or CBAM, process for industrial use.

The timing is not random. The Pentagon is pushing hard to build a domestic drone supply chain, and Impossible Objects says its CBAM 25 printers can produce up to 10,000 drone bodies a month for the US Army's Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois. That claim has been part of the company's pitch since RAPID + TCT back in April, and it is now backed by fresh capital.

The round was led by Inflection Equity Partners, a Chicago-based firm that also backed Impossible Objects' original Series A in 2017. That earlier round was $6.4 million, with another $4 million added in 2019, plus an earlier seed round. Before this latest raise, the company had raised roughly $13 million in total. Seven years between major rounds is a long time in hardware, but the investors have been patient.

Part of that patience likely comes from the $20 million in US government contracts and grants the company has collected over the years. Impossible Objects has stayed lean, with around 30 employees, and focused on a single product: the CBAM 25 industrial printer. The differentiator is speed. The company claims its process outpaces competitors when printing with continuous carbon fiber and fiberglass tapes.

Beyond drones, the company is targeting automotive lightweighting, aerospace parts, and electronics tooling. It also runs print services using its own CBAM machines, which gives customers a way to test the process without buying a printer outright.

For the next 12 to 18 months, Impossible Objects says it is aiming for $30 to $50 million in revenue. If the US drone ramp materializes as planned, that target is within reach. The broader context is a slow but steady move toward reshoring American manufacturing, and composite 3D printing is emerging as one of the more practical tools for that shift.

The CBAM 25 is not a desktop machine. It is an industrial system built for specific materials and specific applications. That narrow focus has kept the company small, but it may also be the reason it survived while other composite 3D printing startups stalled. The drone market gives it a clear, high-stakes use case, and the defense budget is not cyclical in the way consumer markets are.

Investors seem to believe the technology is ready to scale. The question now is whether Impossible Objects can execute without losing the discipline that kept it alive for the past seven years.