{"slug": "vulcanforms-hires-matthew-rose-to-take-its-manufacturing-pitch-deeper-into", "title": "VulcanForms hires Matthew Rose to take its manufacturing pitch deeper into national security", "summary": "VulcanForms appointed Matthew Rose as executive vice president of Mission Systems to expand its metal manufacturing services for government, defense, and national-security customers. Rose, formerly of Snowflake and Adobe, will lead partnerships and help deploy VulcanForms' digital factories for critical sectors. The hire underscores VulcanForms' strategy of selling finished parts and production services rather than 3D printers.", "body_md": "[Matthew Rose](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/vulcanforms-appoints-matthew-rose-as-executive-vice-president-of-mission-systems-302817080.html?ref=runtimewire) is joining [VulcanForms](https://www.vulcanforms.com/?ref=runtimewire) as executive vice president of Mission Systems, a role aimed at turning the MIT-born metal manufacturing business that Martin C. Feldmann and MIT professor John Hart started in 2015 into a larger supplier for government, defense and other national-security customers.\n\n[VulcanForms announced the appointment Friday](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/vulcanforms-appoints-matthew-rose-as-executive-vice-president-of-mission-systems-302817080.html?ref=runtimewire), saying Rose will lead the Mission Systems organization, expand partnerships across government and industry, and help customers deploy VulcanForms' manufacturing platform for defense, aerospace, [critical infrastructure](/article/sebastian-kurz-dream-series-c-ai-cybersecurity) and related markets. VulcanForms says Rose most recently led Global Public Sector initiatives at Snowflake, previously held a senior role at Adobe, served in government roles across the General Services Administration, Department of Homeland Security, Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, Office of the Secretary of Defense and Defense Intelligence Agency, and continues to serve as an officer in the Army Reserve.\n\nThe hire matters because VulcanForms is selling a different proposition from most of the 3D-printing market. VulcanForms says it does not sell printers. VulcanForms builds and operates digital factories that combine laser powder bed fusion, machining, inspection and software, then sells finished metal parts and production services. VulcanForms lists aerospace, defense, transportation, energy, equipment, consumer goods, medical, compute, space and suppressors among the industries it serves, and says its facilities are in Devens and Newburyport, Massachusetts.\n\nThat model has made executive hiring a strategic function for VulcanForms. A company selling machines needs customers to believe the equipment works. VulcanForms needs customers to trust the factory, the quality system, the supply chain and the people operating between engineers, procurement offices and mission owners. Rose's background is matched to that wedge: public-sector software buying at Snowflake, a previous role at Adobe, service inside national-security institutions, and continuing Army Reserve ties.\n\n\"Manufacturing is now a strategic capability for the United States,\" VulcanForms CEO Kevin Kassekert said in the release. Rose said VulcanForms' combination of \"integrated production, automation, data-driven processes, and operational excellence\" creates capabilities that were not available a decade ago.\n\n### A founder's manufacturing thesis, rebuilt as an operating company\n\nVulcanForms began as a technical argument inside MIT: metal additive manufacturing had to move from prototyping into scaled production. [MIT News reported in 2022](https://news.mit.edu/2022/vulcanforms-printing-manufacturing-1128?ref=runtimewire) that Feldmann, then an MIT Master of Engineering student, met Hart in an additive manufacturing class, later worked in Hart's lab, and joined him in trying to rearchitect laser powder bed fusion so more lasers could operate at once while preserving quality.\n\nHart framed the bottleneck plainly in that MIT piece: LPBF was already used in areas like jet-engine fuel nozzles and orthopedic implants, but the broader industrial opportunity was still barely tapped. VulcanForms' answer was to package the printer, machining, robotics, postprocessing and monitoring systems into a production foundry rather than ask each customer to buy machines and assemble that stack themselves.\n\nThat founding choice still defines VulcanForms' commercial motion. VulcanForms' site says customers can buy precision end-use parts and production services, with support from prototyping and pilot runs through high-volume production. VulcanForms says it works with titanium, Inconel, stainless steels, nickel-based superalloys and other performance alloys, and that it is ITAR certified.\n\nThe Mission Systems title gives Rose a mandate that sounds closer to systems integration than ordinary sales. Defense and intelligence buyers do not adopt new manufacturing capacity because a part can be printed. They adopt it when quality, security, repeatability, domestic sourcing and delivery timelines fit procurement and program realities. Rose's job is to make VulcanForms legible to those buyers while helping VulcanForms understand where a manufacturing platform can actually be inserted into existing mission workflows.\n\n### VulcanForms has capital, but execution is the constraint\n\nThe appointment follows a dense six months for VulcanForms. In January, [VulcanForms said it closed $220 million in new financing](https://www.vulcanforms.com/press/vulcanforms-raises-220-million-in-new-financing-to-scale-its-leading-u-s-integrated-digital-metal-manufacturing-platform/?ref=runtimewire) led by [Eclipse](https://www.eclipse.capital/?ref=runtimewire) and [1789 Capital](https://www.1789capital.vc/?ref=runtimewire), with participation from Washington Harbour, Fontinalis, IEQ Capital and others. VulcanForms said that financing would support expansion of its integrated manufacturing facilities, its technology roadmap, materials work and future capacity.\n\nThat January release also claimed VulcanForms had secured large multi-billion-dollar commercial programs across medical devices, consumer products, aerospace, defense and industrial segments. VulcanForms did not name those customers in the release, and the release did not disclose VulcanForms' 2026 valuation, revenue or current headcount.\n\nThe financing came after VulcanForms' earlier scale-up moment. In June 2022, [VulcanForms announced $355 million in capital and a valuation above $1 billion](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220627005615/en/VulcanForms-Announces-Capital-Raise-of-%24355-Million-and-Pioneers-Industrial-Scale-Digital-Manufacturing-Infrastructure?ref=runtimewire), naming investors including Eclipse Ventures, Stata Venture Partners, Fontinalis Partners, D1 Capital Partners, Standard Investments, Atlas Innovate, Boston Seed Capital, Industry Ventures and the Simkins Family. VulcanForms also revealed its first two production facilities, in Devens and Newburyport, and said its Devens VulcanOne facility would use 100-kilowatt-class laser powder bed fusion systems totaling more than 2 megawatts of laser capacity.\n\nVulcanForms' 2022 release said VulcanForms served defense, aerospace, medical and semiconductor customers and had grown to more than 300 employees. Those figures are now four years old, but they show why the business stopped looking like a lab spinout long before Rose arrived.\n\nLeadership has been reshaped around that shift. [Kevin Kassekert became CEO in September 2024](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/vulcanforms-appoints-kevin-kassekert-as-ceo-and-jay-martin-as-president-to-drive-next-phase-of-growth-302252729.html?ref=runtimewire), after operating roles at Redwood Materials and Tesla. VulcanForms said at the time that Feldmann's team had built the core technology and that VulcanForms was moving from pilot-scale manufacturing to high-volume production. [Michael Kenworthy joined as CTO on June 26, 2026](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/vulcanforms-appoints-michael-kenworthy-as-chief-technology-officer-302811215.html?ref=runtimewire), after engineering and product roles at Relativity Space, Seurat Technologies, Divergent, GE Aviation and Honeywell.\n\nRose is the customer-side counterpart to that technical and operating bench. Kenworthy is tasked with technology strategy, process capabilities, automation and production efficiency. Rose is tasked with translating those capabilities into government and industry partnerships. For a company whose factory is the product, both jobs sit close to the core of the business.\n\n### The defense opportunity is real, and unforgiving\n\nVulcanForms' timing fits a broader market shift toward domestic production for critical components, a theme VulcanForms has used consistently in its financing and hiring announcements. Supply-chain security has become a budget argument, a procurement argument and a political argument. Additive manufacturing benefits from that environment because it promises shorter supply chains and faster iteration for complex parts.\n\nThe hard part is that the same customers most interested in domestic, high-spec manufacturing are also the least forgiving. Aerospace, medical, defense and semiconductor buyers require qualification, traceability and reliability, and the public numbers VulcanForms has released do not yet show how much of its pipeline has converted into durable production revenue. VulcanForms' claim of large multi-billion-dollar commercial programs is significant if those programs are contracted and ramping, but VulcanForms has not disclosed the customer names, economics or timelines behind the figure.\n\nRose's appointment is therefore a commercial test of the founder thesis. Feldmann and Hart built VulcanForms around the idea that metal additive manufacturing becomes more valuable when it is absorbed into a full production system. Kassekert has been aligning the organization around scale. Rose now has to help prove that defense and government buyers will treat VulcanForms as an industrial partner, rather than another advanced manufacturing vendor with promising equipment and a long qualification road ahead.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/vulcanforms-hires-matthew-rose-to-take-its-manufacturing-pitch-deeper-into", "canonical_source": "https://runtimewire.com/article/vulcanforms-matthew-rose-mission-systems", "published_at": "2026-07-03 22:55:42+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-03 23:23:46.419096+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-policy"], "entities": ["VulcanForms", "Matthew Rose", "Snowflake", "Adobe", "MIT", "Kevin Kassekert", "Martin C. 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