For 15 years, the Forbes 30 Under 30 North America list has highlighted young people who are reshaping industries across the U.S.and Canada.This year, a few innovators stand out for their use of 3D printing in incredible and practical ways.
And they are part of a wider global trend, as other Forbes lists in Europe and Asia are also beginning to spotlight rising creators pushing 3D printing in new directions.Forbes selects its 30 Under 30 honorees from thousands of nominations, using expert judges and editors to evaluate each candidate’s impact, innovation, and potential.Out of the 600 young leaders chosen for the North America list this year, only a handful are working directly with 3D printing, and these are the names you should know.
Nick Callegari — Verustruct (Manufacturing & Industry) 3DPrint.com recently spoke with honoree Nick Callegari, founder of Verustruct, about his mission to bring 3D printed housing into the mainstream.Callegari, a Yale School of Management (SOM) graduate, started the company to address the housing affordability crisis with faster, lower-cost construction technology.Start Up Yale 2025 award to Verustruct founder Nick Callegari (second from left).
Image courtesy of Verustruct.Verustruct is developing large-scale 3D printing systems designed to build durable homes more efficiently than traditional methods.At Yale, Callegari was deeply involved in entrepreneurship programs and earned multiple innovation awards before becoming a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree.
As he wrote when the news broke, “Housing is a human right,” and Verustruct is his attempt to make it happen through scalable 3D printed construction.Verustruct’s 3D printed construction technology prototype.Image courtesy of Verustruct.
“I’m incredibly honored to be named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 – Manufacturing list.But the truth is: this isn’t the milestone I’m focused on.The real milestone will be when families everywhere have access to safe, affordable, sustainable places to live — and that’s the future we’re building at Verustruct.
Housing is a human right.We’re still early, but we won’t stop fighting until everyone has a place they can proudly call home.To everyone who’s been part of this journey so far — thank you.
Your belief, brilliance, and heart are what make this work possible,” Callegari posted on LinkedIn.“Excited to keep building toward a better world for all of us.” Eric Shnell and Meher Akhil Birlangi — Craitor (Manufacturing & Industry) Craitor‘s founders built something unusual for the defense world: FieldFab, a rugged, portable 3D printer designed to work in extreme conditions, from desert heat to freezing cold, even while riding in a Black Hawk helicopter.Craitor’s FieldFab.
Image courtesy of Craitor.Developed in close collaboration with the U.S.military, FieldFab lets troops print mission-critical parts, tools, and even small drone components on demand instead of waiting days for supply lines to catch up.
It’s been tested to military standards for shock, vibration, and weather, turning 3D printing into a real field asset rather than just a lab experiment.Craitor’s FieldFab printer tested in the field.Image courtesy of Craitor.
Co-founders Eric Shnell and Meher Akhil Birlangi have secured $3.3 million in government contracts, largely from Department of War grants.Craitor co-founders Eric Shnell and Meher Akhil Birlangi.Image courtesy of Forbes.
Lucas Pabarcius, Malcolm Tisdale, and Matteo Kimura — Atum Works (Science) Atum Works is working on one of the most futuristic ideas on the list: a 3D printer for semiconductor chips.The team is trying to replace the traditional 2D lithography process that has powered the chip industry for decades.Today’s tools, like the ones made by ASML, etch flat patterns onto silicon.
But that approach is hitting its physical limits, and packing more power into a single chip is becoming harder every year, the founders explain.Atum Works wants to flip that model.They’re building a true 3D lithography system that can place materials at the nanometer scale and create full 3D structures inside a chip.
More layers, more wiring, more space for computation, but without the bottlenecks of 2D design.The company believes that if chips can be printed instead of etched, manufacturing could become cheaper, more flexible, and better suited for the demands of modern AI hardware.Atum Works co-founders Lucas Pabarcius, Malcolm Tisdale, and Matteo Kimura.
Image courtesy of Malcolm Tisdale via LinkedIn.Co-founders Lucas Pabarcius, Malcolm Tisdale, and Matteo Kimura (engineers with roots at Caltech and NASA) believe additive manufacturing could be the key to pushing beyond the limits of conventional semiconductor fabrication.What’s more, they claim that their process could make some parts over 10,000 times cheaper in low-volume production and 10 times more affordable at scale compared to today’s lithography.
The company has already raised more than $10 million to advance its technology and scale early prototypes.And since going through the Y Combinator startup accelerator, Atum Works has built an actual working printer prototype, formed a partnership with NVIDIA, and begun preparing to ship early products.If the company succeeds, microchips could eventually be printed rather than etched, marking one of the biggest changes in chip manufacturing in decades.
Ashika Gopalkrishnan and NASA’s 3D Printing Pipeline Ashika Gopalkrishnan, a 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in the Aerospace category, plays a key role in how 3D printing innovation reaches NASA.Ashika Gopalkrishnan.Image courtesy of NASA/Forbes.
We talk about NASA’s AM work all the time, and that usually means lunar regolith printing, metal additive manufacturing for propulsion, and in-space manufacturing (and so much more).Gopalkrishnan helps make those projects possible.As the product director for the Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) program, she oversees a $180 million annual funding pipeline that often supports additive manufacturing startups.
By cutting processing times, digitizing submissions, and opening doors for small companies, Gopalkrishnan has strengthened NASA’s broader innovation pipeline and, in turn, the 3D printing ecosystem, making it easier for new innovators to break in.These young makers show how steadily the field is expanding.From housing and hardware to microchips and medicine, they’re showing how progress often starts at the edges, in the sectors where demand and pressure for new solutions are highest.
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