A Minnesota company that's developed a next-generation, rapid-turnaround system to deliver plastic molds and parts for manufacturers has scored one of the biggest equity investments in a private Minnesota company in recent years.
North Bridge Growth Equity of Boston and Silicon Valley, Calif., has invested $52 million for an unspecified minority stake in Maple Plain-based Proto Labs Inc., the company will announce Tuesday. Proto Labs is the global leader in rapid injection molding and computer-controlled rapid prototyping, according to the company and trade press.
The latest investment is more than three times larger than the approximately $15 million in existing equity raised from executives and Minneapolis-based Private Capital Management, an early-stage investor.
The company expects to post revenue of about $50 million and employ nearly 300 people in North America, Europe and Japan by the end of this year.
Brad Cleveland, Proto Labs chief executive since 2001, said the funds will be used for technology development, expansion and buying back some stock from original shareholders. However, Cleveland said existing shareholders will continue to own majority control of the company.
Cleveland said the company has been profitable since 2002 and has no imminent plans to sell shares to the public.
Proto Labs, through its Protomold and First Cut Prototype divisions, has received national attention in industry press for cutting the lead time for providing low-volume production of injection-molded plastic parts and computer numerically controlled (CNC) machined-prototype parts through the use of its proprietary software.
"On the outside, we look like a glorified, quick-turn job shop," Cleveland said in an interview. "Once you get inside, we are a very high-performance software development company. We run it on computing systems that we built ourselves. We've automated most of the manual labor out of the process. Most of the Protomold side, the tool-making side in our industry by other companies, has gone to China. We use our software and parallel-processing to automate a lot of that design and manual programming to cut out those molds. We do it here in Maple Plain, 20 miles west of downtown Minneapolis, and in Telford, England."