Stratasys has won $7.8 million in funding through the 2026 America Makes and Department of War (DoW) Organic Industrial Base (OIB) Modernization Challenge, a program built to advance additive manufacturing for defense manufacturing modernization. The 24-month award will fund development of in-situ quality assurance capabilities for the company's F3300™ and F900® industrial FDM® platforms, letting manufacturers capture process data during a build instead of relying solely on inspection after it finishes.
The funding targets what Stratasys and America Makes describe as a central bottleneck limiting broader adoption of additive manufacturing in production environments: verifying part quality quickly, consistently and with enough technical evidence to support scale. Manufacturers in regulated industries currently lean on extensive post-print inspection and qualification before parts ship. Capturing quality data during the print, rather than after, is meant to shrink that inspection burden and compress qualification cycles. Engineers running qualification programs will care about this because in-situ monitoring could turn additive manufacturing from a part-by-part qualification exercise into a repeatable production process.
The project will build monitoring capabilities for the F3300 and F900 that flag anomalies during a build and generate documentation to support quality decisions, according to Stratasys. Rich Garrity, Chief Business Unit Officer at Stratasys, said the goal is to let production teams "qualify applications with less friction, expand production capacity more efficiently and integrate additive manufacturing more effectively into demanding production environments." The resulting tools are expected to apply across defense, aerospace, commercial aviation and other industrial markets where traceability and process control matter for part qualification.
The award comes through America Makes' 2026 OIB Modernization Challenge, which funds projects meant to strengthen the defense industrial base's manufacturing capacity and supply chains. John Wilczynski, Executive Director of America Makes, said the work marks a shift from isolated additive manufacturing applications toward "qualified, scalable production" across the defense enterprise. Stratasys has not said when the new monitoring capabilities will reach F3300 and F900 customers already running the platforms in production.
