The Cloud Plus Computing Power Equals New Designs Mimicking Nature

Avi Reichental emigrated to the United States from his native Israel in 1977 after serving as a helicopter mechanic in the Israeli Air Force . He settled in Connecticut and did what he called the “usual things” an immigrant does in this country: mopping floors, working in nursing homes, selling Electrolux vacuum cleaners door to door.

“I had the same beginning of all newcomers to the land of opportunity,” Reichental said.

Eventually Reichental moved to Queens. In 1981, he landed a “dream job” at a company called Sealed Air. It’s the company that inadvertently invented bubble wrap, when founders Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes set out in 1957 to create a new kind of wallpaper consisting of two sheets of plastic laminated together with air bubbles in between. 

Reichental worked at Sealed Air for 22 years, rising through the ranks to become a senior executive in the company.

“When I started with Sealed Air it had about 400 employees,” Reichental said. “When I left, we had 18,500 employees. Today, we would have called it a unicorn. Back in the day we just called it a great business.”

After Sealed Air, Reichental was offered the CEO position at 3D Systems, based in Valencia, California, one of the pioneering companies in 3D printing. The company was generating about $100 million in annual revenue when Reichental took over in 2003. By the time he stepped down in 2015, 3D Systems had reached $700 million in annual revenue.

“I ended up being one of the visible evangelists of the 3D printing industry,” Reichental said. “In 2003 when I took over as CEO of 3D Systems, very few people understood it.”

After he left 3D Systems, Reichental, 63, thought about retiring, doing some passive venture investments and “creating a little innovation lab for myself because I have a busy mind.”

“I invented quite a few things in my life,” Reichental said. “I have more than 35 patents.”

It didn’t work out that way. Instead, in 2016 Reichental founded another company, XPonentialWorks, in Ventura, California, which is the culmination of his 34 years as an entrepreneur. With his new company Reichental has set out to digitize manufacturing in a way he doesn’t believe has yet been done.

“We sit here in a campus with quite a few early stage companies re-imagine manufacturing in terms of speed and material science,” Reichental said.

As an example of what he’s talking about, Reichental points to Arcimoto in Eugene, Oregon. Arcimoto, a company building small, three-wheel electric vehicles, ranging from a car it calls an FUV, to the Deliverator, a delivery vehicle, and the Rapid Responder, intended for first responders and law enforcement.

“It’s slightly larger than a motorcycle, but has the stability of a car,” Reichental says of the vehicles being made by Arcimoto. “It’s easy and very efficient, it’s electric, and it’s fun to drive so they created this new category called FUV, fun utility vehicle.”

Arcimoto came to Reichental with the challenge to make their vehicles even lighter than they already were, without sacrificing strength or safety. Using computer-generated design, Reichental’s team at XPonentialWorks cut the weight of the vehicle by between 35 and 50 percent in just a day and a half of work, creating many of the new parts through 3D printing — Reichental’s former business experience.

“It’s all about using computing power in the cloud and machine-learning algorithms that figure out how to optimize structures in a way that us mere humans could not design,” Reichental said. “These structures are very organic and efficient.”

Think of it, Reichental said, in terms of how efficient your skeleton is — bones are light, but capable of bearing a lot of weight.

“What we’re discovering is the convergence of the cloud and computing power allows us to mimic what nature did millions of years ago,” Reichental said. “Nature somehow figured all this out through evolution.”