Xometry, a web-based procurement company based in both Gaithersburg, Maryland, and in Lexington, is built around a simple concept: Connect people who want to make things with others who have the capacity to do so. While the process for using its web-based platform to match projects with qualified machine and fabrication shops around the country is straightforward, the company’s leadership believes that the decentralized, on-demand network it’s created has the potential to completely transform how and where goods are designed and manufactured.
Drura Parrish
“Amazon has done a really good job in changing how the things that we make are sold, and when you think about the next major chapter, we need to change the way that we design and do,” said Drura Parrish, Xometry’s executive vice president for platform. “If you change that, the rest of the value stream completely reconfigures around it.”
In July, Xometry acquired Lexington-based MakeTime, a company with a very similar mission and model that Parrish founded in 2014, and Parrish joined the company’s leadership team. While terms of the deal were not disclosed, the combined assets from the acquisition grew the company to roughly 170 employees, about 30 of whom are based in Lexington, as well as to more than 2,500 manufacturing partners in its network. Foundry Group, a Boulder, Colorado-based venture capital firm and an early investor in MakeTime, is leading a new $25 million round of funding that will help grow the company even further.
“We probably did one of the quickest dating to acquisition passes that you can imagine. It was completely copacetic,” Parrish said. “It was an almost identical mission, which is we want to make manufacturing better for both sides. The customer wants more now, and the supplier is not seeing enough of it. How do you fix that? You fix it through technology.”
Streamlining the flow
Previously, designers, procurement teams or engineers with custom manufacturing needs would design their part or parts, send out a request for proposals and wait for responses.
There was likely at least one round of changes to either the design or quantity, which would require more rounds of feedback. Designers were frustrated by the cumbersome process, and machine shops spent a lot of time and energy responding to inquiries for jobs they might not fulfill. With Xometry’s web-based platform and instant-quoting engine, anyone with anything to make can simply upload a design file via a secure connection and immediately receive a quoted price that automatically updates based on design changes, chosen fit and finishes, and other variables.
When one of Xometry’s network of more than 2,500 manufacturing partners accepts a job file, the parts are produced to exacting specifications.
After an order is placed, it goes out to qualified machine shops within Xometry’s partner network, and shops with the extra capacity can choose to accept or pass on the job. “We have tons of projects flowing across by the minute, so they’re grabbing and taking them pre-priced, and they just process them,” Parrish said. “Then we have a large operations team behind them—engineers, procurement specialists and sourcing pros—who make sure that everything gets taken care of. It’s just a beautiful flow of projects. It works.”
"Pride comes in the delivery of the solution." — Drura Parrish
When asked if it’s been a difficult adjustment, as the founder of MakeTime, to fold his company into another operation, Parrish is quick to qualify how the move has helped further both his and Xometry’s shared mission.
“When I started MakeTime, it was one stop on a long path of solving a critical problem, which is how do we make design and making the same thing?” he said. “Pride comes in the delivery of the solution, so whatever that path is, as long as you have mutual velocity that is increasing and you create a platform for multiple people to benefit—like millions, billions of people—that’s all I’ve ever cared about. It’s the same thing with [Xometry co-founder and CEO Randy Altschuler], too. This is big. And it’s going to be bigger in terms of a solution and how we’re going to reconfigure the world, and we need to work together on it.”
Local talent; common roots
One of Parrish’s earliest memories is of the steady hum of sodium halide lights at Scott Industries, the fabrication shop his grandfather founded in Henderson, Kentucky, where Parrish grew up and where his father also worked. He did not hear the machines because, as he later realized, there wasn’t enough work to keep them running full tilt. Similar experiences and opportunities would build on themselves to, eventually, form MakeTime.
While in graduate school for architecture, for example, he noticed that many classmates, artists and designers he knew had a need to manufacture projects but didn’t have the equipment to do so, so he began buying unused capacity at various fabrication facilities and matching artists and designers with an appropriate partner. He also co-founded a gallery, Land of Tomorrow, to exhibit and sell goods produced by those artists and designers.
Xometry’s proprietary software allows users to upload a file and see real-time pricing changes as the design or specifications are modified. / Photo by William Krueger
When he decided to launch MakeTime, several people advised that he needed to locate in Silicon Valley or a similar locus of technological innovation—anywhere but the Bluegrass, they said, where he’d never find the level of expertise he needed. But his experience had shown him otherwise, as Central Kentucky’s agricultural and industrial roots, coupled with it’s centralized location and, in many cases, its underutilized talent pool, have proven to provide many tangible advantages.
“Kentucky is a magical place; there’s a magical connectively that occurs here,” Parrish said. “And what’s very special about Kentucky, is you’re one degree out from being touched by manufacturing in your family. It’s that rare resource of being able to say, ‘Oh, I’m a software programmer, but my uncle is a machinist.’ Those types of stories are around here.”
Now, having successfully leveraged his MakeTime concept through the acquisition process and into an even more ambitious enterprise in Xometry, he has found that the region’s talent pool is far deeper and the community support for new enterprises—no matter how far-fetched the concept may sound—is far stronger than many recognize.
“Nobody told me it was crazy—nobody,” Parrish said of starting up MakeTime. “What’s amazing about Lexington is you think most people are geared to be conservative in terms of work; but they’re actually more adventuresome. The integrity is in the idea. If you can convince them of that, you’ve got a workforce of brilliant, talented people.”
“And if they’re a believer,” he added, “they’ll go.”