Divergent Technologies
Assembly Line
Divergent Technologies, Inc. Announces Closing of Upsized $230 Million Series D Capital Raise
Divergent Technologies, the company that has invented, developed, and commercialized the worldās first end-to-end digital industrial manufacturing system, announced today that it has completed a Series D equity financing totaling $230 million. The round was led by a $100 million investment from Hexagon AB and included participation from new and existing institutional and family office investors.
Divergent has developed the Divergent Adaptive Production System (āDAPSā¢ā), an end-to-end system-level replacement for traditional design, manufacturing, and assembly solutions. DAPS is a complete software-hardware production system that leverages in-house developed AI-driven generative design software to computationally engineer structures, novel materials and additive manufacturing to materialize structures, and automated fixtureless assembly to create large multi-part assemblies. Products created using DAPS are superior in performance, lower in cost, rapidly customizable to meet mission and customer-specific requirements, faster to market, and scalable on demand to high volume production.
Divergent uses this revolutionary system to supply the automotive, aerospace and defense industries with next generation products as a certified Tier 1 supplier. It has seven blue-chip automotive customers, including Aston Martin and Mercedes-AMG. Within the aerospace and defense industry, Divergent is actively working with six U.S. government contractors across a diverse range of applications.
Digitise and dematerialise: Divergent CEO Kevin Czinger on supplying automotive structures to the world's biggest brands
The manufacture of lithium-ion phosphate battery cells at Codaās facility in China relies heavily on coal-fired power. And because of that, āwell overā 200 kilogrammes (kg) of Co2 per kilowatt hour (kWh) is being produced in battery manufacture. At this time, kg of Co2 per kWh is the most important metric on Czingerās mind and the cogs whirring in his head only intensify as he does the workings out to reveal that these batteries and EVs arenāt having enough impact.
Post Coda, Czinger educated himself on lifecycle assessments, figuring only a holistic approach would return the energy emission reduction that is required in an era of climate emergency. He also came to realise that the way automotive structures are manufactured, and the costs required to do so, need optimising ā particularly as EVs, hybrid cars and internal combustion engine vehicles (and all the tooling and fixturing to come with them) continue to emerge. āThe amortisation period, the competition, the driving down of values, youāre looking and saying, āthis is environmentally and economically broken,āā Czinger says.
Czinger and his team developed the Divergent Adaptive Production System (DAPS) to ādigitise and dematerialiseā automotive production and provide the technical competency for the company, in time, to become a Tier One supplier to the automotive industry. What Divergent is willing to talk about, however, is how its DAPS workflow works. Its engineers start by understanding the static stiffness targets of a structure, then the typical load cases it will be exposed to, then what its boundary conditions are, then its crash requirements, durability requirements and dynamic stiffness response requirements. This information is the input for the Divergent design algorithm, which is where the company enters the concept phase. Here, Divergent gives the OEM āoptionalityā to, for example, reduce stiffness in a certain area of the structure to reduce mass. After the concept phase comes the detailed design phase, and after that, itās time to print the part.