SPEE3D, the Australian pioneer of Cold Spray Manufacturing (CSM), has announced a leadership handoff that puts a veteran defense-industry executive in charge of day-to-day global operations while the company's co-founder repositions himself closer to what SPEE3D now calls one of its most important markets. Bryan O'Connor, who brings more than 30 years of senior-executive experience across the aerospace, defense, and industrial-automation sectors, has been named Global CEO. Outgoing CEO and co-founder Byron Kennedy is relocating to the United States, where SPEE3D says he will focus on building the company's presence, partnerships, and business in that market.
The move is less a retirement than a reassignment of effort. Rather than stepping away from the company he helped build, Kennedy is repositioning himself inside SPEE3D's fastest-growing market, leaving global operations to an executive whose résumé is built almost entirely around scaling defense-adjacent businesses. "SPEE3D has grown from an Australian start-up into a company shaping how Defence forces sustain capability around the world," Kennedy said in the announcement, framing his relocation as a next chapter rather than an exit.
Who Is Bryan O'Connor
According to SPEE3D's official announcement, O'Connor's background centers on Moog, the motion-control and aerospace systems manufacturer, where he served as General Manager for Asia-Pacific Defence and as Managing Director of Moog Australia. In those roles he oversaw the construction of new facilities in 2014 and a further major expansion in 2022, supporting Defence and aerospace programs across the region. He also played a key role in securing strategic opportunities across several high-profile defense programs: the Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator (ASCA), the Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance (GWEO) enterprise, the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS), the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, and what SPEE3D's announcement lists as GCSP. His career also includes senior leadership roles at Apple, across Australia and Ireland, rounding out a profile that spans large-scale consumer manufacturing as well as defense procurement. A separate report from 3DPrint.com, published September 14, 2026, corroborated the appointment, describing O'Connor's tenure at Moog's Asia-Pacific Space and Defense business and noting SPEE3D's close ties to both the US Army and the US Navy.
SPEE3D Chairman Adam Lewis framed the appointment as a direct response to the company's ambitions in defense markets. In the official announcement, Lewis said O'Connor's experience "building and growing Defence businesses across Australia and the Indo-Pacific" makes him an exceptional fit for the role. O'Connor himself struck a similar note, saying SPEE3D "is developing game-changing technology with the potential to fundamentally change how Defence forces manufacture, repair and sustain critical capability in the field," and pointing specifically to the company's CriticalSPEE3D system, which he said "has the potential to revolutionise Forward Operating Base logistics by enabling critical metal parts to be produced rapidly and close to where they are needed." That phrasing signals where SPEE3D's board sees the company's near-term opportunity: not in the broader industrial 3D printing market generally, but specifically in defense and allied-government procurement, where SPEE3D's cold-spray technology has already found a niche producing metal parts and repairs in the field.
Why Kennedy Is Moving, Not Stepping Back
SPEE3D currently operates across three countries: Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Kennedy's relocation to the US puts him inside the market the company's leadership has identified as the priority for the next phase of growth. Rather than exiting the business, he is narrowing his focus to partnerships and expansion in a single geography, while O'Connor inherits responsibility for coordinating operations across all three regions.
The US push already has physical infrastructure behind it. SPEE3D operates a combined applications-testing site and assembly operation in New Hampshire, and, per 3DPrint.com's report, the company recently carried out its first mobile expeditionary manufacturing demonstration at RIMPAC 2026, alongside its stated relationships with the US Army and Navy. Those are the kinds of customer and program relationships that tend to require sustained, in-person attention rather than remote oversight from Australia — which is consistent with Kennedy relocating to work them directly rather than continuing to run them from a distance.
That division of labor is notable for a company at SPEE3D's stage. Splitting a CEO's global responsibilities from a founder's market-specific push is a structure more commonly associated with companies that have outgrown a single leader's bandwidth, or that see a specific region as requiring sustained, senior-level relationship-building rather than remote oversight. Defense procurement, in particular, tends to reward exactly that kind of dedicated, in-market presence — the kind of program-level access O'Connor spent years cultivating at Moog.
What It Means for Makers
SPEE3D's cold-spray process is not a desktop technology, and this leadership change won't show up in anyone's hobbyist workflow. Cold Spray Manufacturing builds metal parts by accelerating powder particles to supersonic speeds so they bond on impact without melting — a process suited to rapid metal repair and production in field or industrial settings, not to prototyping on a build plate at home. But the reshuffle is still worth watching for anyone tracking where metal AM investment and technical talent are flowing.
A leadership team built around defense-program veterans, rather than generalist manufacturing executives, is a strong signal about where SPEE3D expects its revenue to come from over the next several years. For the broader 3D printing industry, that matters because SPEE3D has been one of the more visible commercial validators of metal additive manufacturing outside the desktop and prosumer space that most FilamentFeed readers interact with directly. Defense and government contracts tend to bring sustained capital, rigorous qualification standards, and long procurement cycles — all of which can accelerate the maturation of a manufacturing process in ways that consumer-facing markets alone cannot. If SPEE3D's bet on US defense partnerships pays off under this new structure, the resulting investment in cold-spray process refinement, materials work, and field-deployable hardware could eventually filter down into more accessible industrial and prosumer metal printing tools, the same way aerospace-driven advances in polymer and metal AM have historically trickled into hobbyist-adjacent products over time.
Bottom Line
SPEE3D is doubling down on defense as its core growth market, and it's restructuring its leadership to match: a global CEO with deep defense-program credentials handling worldwide operations, and a hands-on founder relocating to the US to work partnerships directly. It's a structural bet, not a retirement, and it says more about where SPEE3D thinks metal AM's next big contracts will come from than about any change to the underlying cold-spray technology itself.
