Formlabs is bringing some of Apple's hardware pedigree into its boardroom. The Somerville, Massachusetts-based 3D printing company announced August 12 that Dan Riccio, Apple's former senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, is joining as a strategic advisor and making a personal investment in the company — one piece of a broader shakeup that also hands the board chairmanship to co-founder Max Lobovsky and elevates chief product officer Dávid Lakatos to the role of President.

At Apple, Riccio led the company's Product Design and Hardware Engineering organizations, overseeing development of the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. That background sits squarely in the kind of high-volume, tightly toleranced manufacturing discipline that Formlabs — a company that has spent the past decade trying to move desktop-grade resin and powder printing into serious manufacturing environments — is trying to build toward. Formlabs was named one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies in Manufacturing in 2024, according to its press release, one marker of how far the company's ambitions have moved beyond the desktop-printer category it started in. Bringing in an operator with Riccio's pedigree, alongside a personal financial stake, reads as a vote of confidence in where the company is headed, even though neither Formlabs nor the coverage of the announcement disclosed the size of Riccio's investment.

Formlabs is no small operation at this point. Formlabs' own release, carried via WBOC, describes the company as the largest professional 3D printing company founded since the 1980s, with a product lineup spanning SLA and SLS printing systems, post-processing hardware, and more than 45 materials. Riccio's arrival, alongside the rest of the board changes, is consistent with a company positioning itself to keep growing in that professional and industrial segment rather than treating the moment as a one-off publicity hire.

A Full Board Reshuffle, Not Just a New Name

The Riccio hire is the headline, but the more structurally significant news is the leadership reshuffle happening around him. Co-founder Max Lobovsky is stepping up to board chairman, succeeding fellow co-founder Natan Linder, who is stepping down from the board after 15 years but staying on as a strategic advisor to the company. Linder has been a fixture at Formlabs since its founding — a co-founder relinquishing a board seat after a decade and a half, even while remaining involved informally, is the kind of transition that typically marks a company shifting from "founder-led scrappy startup" mode into something built for a longer, more institutional runway.

Dávid Lakatos, previously chief product officer and an early Formlabs employee who has led the product organization for more than a decade, is being promoted to the title of President and is joining the board alongside that promotion. Lakatos has been one of the more public faces of Formlabs' product strategy in recent years, and formalizing his role at the board level suggests the company wants product decisions represented directly at the governance layer rather than filtered up through the CEO's office alone.

Rounding out the changes, Nadia Shouraboura — a Formlabs board member since 2022 and a former Amazon executive who oversaw the company's worldwide supply chain and fulfillment operations — is becoming Lead Director, according to Engineering.com's reporting on the announcement. Shouraboura's background is squarely in the mechanics of moving physical goods at scale — a skill set that maps directly onto Formlabs' stated ambitions to grow beyond prototyping into higher-volume production runs. Existing board member Rob Willett, the former CEO of machine-vision company Cognex, is also increasing his personal stake in Formlabs as part of the same announcement, according to the company's press release.

Put together, the reshuffle reads less like a single celebrity hire and more like a coordinated bet: an Apple hardware veteran advising on engineering and manufacturing discipline, an Amazon supply-chain veteran overseeing governance, and the company's own product chief now sitting at the board table. That's a lineup assembled for scaling production, not for chasing the next flashy desktop resin printer.

What It Means for Makers

For the individual maker with a Form 4 or a Fuse 1+ on the bench, none of this changes anything about tomorrow's print queue. Boardroom appointments don't ship firmware updates or change resin pricing overnight. But the direction of travel is worth watching for a few reasons.

First, Formlabs disclosed in the same announcement that its annual revenue has surpassed $250 million and that its printers have produced more than 500 million parts to date, per Engineering.com's reporting on the release. That's a company that has long since outgrown the "hobbyist desktop printer maker" label it wore a decade ago, even if a meaningful slice of its install base still lives in classrooms, dental labs, and small workshops rather than factory floors.

Second, a board stacked with hardware-scaling and supply-chain expertise is a reasonable leading indicator of where product investment goes next: faster iteration cycles, more industrial-grade materials, and likely more attention on throughput and reliability at volume rather than incremental desktop feature additions. Companies that bring in this profile of advisor are usually preparing to either compete harder for large manufacturing contracts, court additional institutional investment, or both.

Third, for makers who've watched other 3D printing companies wobble through executive churn and down rounds over the past couple of years, a well-known operator putting personal money into Formlabs is a modest but real vote of confidence in the category — even if Riccio's stake size wasn't disclosed in any of the reporting. It doesn't guarantee anything about product roadmaps or pricing, but it's a data point in favor of Formlabs' stability relative to an industry that's seen its share of layoffs and consolidation.

None of the sources indicate any near-term changes to Formlabs' consumer or prosumer product lines, pricing, or software. This is a governance and advisory story, not a product one — at least for now.

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