Lyten's Graphene Filament Powers Modovolo's 3D Printing Platform

Modovolo builds drones. It also builds the 3D printer it uses to build them — because when it went looking for a US-made machine fast and affordable enough to produce aerospace-grade parts at scale, none existed. Now that in-house printer, the BFP platform, is standardizing on a graphene-reinforced filament from materials company Lyten as its default material.

What Happened

Lyten and Modovolo have expanded a partnership that began in 2025, when Modovolo started using Lyten’s materials for its own drone parts. The new agreement extends that relationship across Modovolo’s entire BFP — “Build. Fly. Print.” — platform, a modular, containerized 3D printing system designed to manufacture large aerospace, automotive, and industrial parts close to where they’re needed rather than shipped in from a centralized factory. Lyten’s PA1205, a nylon (PA12) filament reinforced with the company’s proprietary 3D Graphene technology, becomes the standard material across BFP installations.

“We built BFP out of necessity. We could not find a 3D printer fast enough and affordable enough to produce aerospace-grade components at scale for our drones,” said Modovolo co-founder and CEO Justin Call. Lyten co-founder and CEO Dan Cook framed the pairing around reshoring: “Our goal is to prove better-performing, better-priced products can be sourced and manufactured locally.” Both companies plan to demonstrate the combined platform at the CMI2 and Northern Strike military exercises, alongside aerospace and motorsports industry events.

Why It Matters

The scale context is what makes this more than a materials-supplier press release. Modovolo’s own numbers, cited in the 3DPrint.com report, put drone production at roughly 17 million units this year, translating to about 900 million individual parts — a volume the company expects to more than double over the next decade. Legacy industrial 3D printing, priced and speed-tuned for prototyping or short runs, doesn’t hold up at that throughput. Modovolo’s answer was to design its own printer rather than wait for the market to build one, and the drone industry has increasingly become the proving ground for where additive manufacturing works at production scale rather than staying a prototyping tool.

Lyten’s filament is the other half of the equation. According to Lyten’s published spec sheet, PA1205 posts 117 MPa of XY-axis tensile strength — double a standard carbon-fiber-reinforced PA12 — and a Charpy notched impact rating the company lists at over six times higher than comparable CF filaments, with a 162°C heat deflection temperature. Independent testing by Hackaday has corroborated the roughly $150-per-kilogram price point, a real premium over commodity nylon that only makes sense if the part being replaced is expensive enough, or critical enough, to justify it. Aerospace brackets, defense hardware, and motorsports components clear that bar; a desktop hobbyist bracket generally does not.

The supply-chain framing is the part worth sitting with. Both companies are US-based, both materials and equipment for BFP are US-sourced, and the entire pitch is built around not depending on the overseas filament and machine supply chains that dominate industrial FDM. For defense and aerospace buyers specifically, that traceability is often as important as the mechanical spec sheet.

Source: 3DPrint.com

Content created with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy.