Meet Castor
The mission: “To optimise manufacturing – automatically identifying suitable parts for additive manufacturing”
Manufacturing is evolving quickly and additive manufacturing offers many benefits to businesses. “We enable people to quickly check whether it is beneficial for them to move over to this and, if so, how,” says Angeliki Malizou, Castor.
The problem we’re addressing
Cost reduction, supply chain hurdles and sustainability are some of the most pressing issues facing the manufacturing industry. Additive manufacturing can help companies to address some of these issues – helping them to get parts quicker and easier, helping to lightweight parts where possible and creating parts which produce less waste. But it’s hard to know exactly where to start. “A company might be using thousands of individual parts, how do they know which ones are suitable for 3D printing? They don’t have time to go through and check each one,” says Malizou.
What we do
Castor can automatically analyse thousands of parts at one time. Customers just need to upload their CAD files and the software uses advanced algorithms to analyse the files, providing an interactive report with insights and recommendations.
“With our software, manufacturers can overcome a range of challenges by automatically identifying which parts are best suited to being 3D printed, what the economic and CO2 reduction benefits would be, and how to shift to inventory reduction and on-demand manufacturing,” says Malizou.
Our history
Long-time friends, Omer Blaier and Elad Schiller founded Castor in 2017 having studied at Tel Aviv University and The Hebrew University in Jerusalem respectively. In 2018, the company found investment from Tel Aviv University’s academic-based venture fund, TAU Ventures.
Interesting fact about Castor
Castor has 27 employees but its most surprising member of the team is Lechem, the loyal dog mascot, whose name means “bread” in Hebrew. “Seeing him around keeps inspiring and focusing us on our mission,” says Galit Cohen, Castor. “One of our favourite sayings is ‘we are given the ingredients for our daily bread but expected to do the baking’.”
What we hope from Sixth Sense
“We applied for Sixth Sense because we heard very positive things about the platform, and as a company always welcome opportunities to collaborate with different experts and be exposed to new perspectives,” says Malizou. “We believe that our capabilities are complementary to those of Hexagon, and we see this as an excellent opportunity to join forces and ease manufacturers’ adoption of, and transition into, additive manufacturing. Even just a few weeks in, we’ve been opened up to new tools we can use to help convey our offering – we’re excited to see what comes next.”