About us

To make 3D printing benefits available to everyone!

Our Story

The lumi TEAM

To make 3D printing benefits available to everyone, has always been the motto and the aim of Lumi Industries, since its foundation in 2014 by Manuela Pipino, and me, Davide Marin.

I’m the creative part of the team and I love to challenge myself: Impossible is simply not possible! My brain is working at new solutions, new projects and new ideas even when I sleep. You can find some of my crazy creations on Gadget Freak, Hackaday, Instructables under my nick name: Madaeon.

Manuela is the one trying to channel all this energy, and with her on-the-field experience in production, administration and management, having run a subsidiary in India for an Italian furniture company in the past, helps me keep the show on the road.

Eduart Mazrekaj, Mechatronics Specialist, R&D assistant and production Manager, joined the Lumi team in 2016. His job is to assist me in all kinds of R&D projects, organize production and assembly line, but mainly to amuse us with funny jokes and incredible stories from his land, Kosovo!

Many collaborators and interns have also contributed to make Lumi Industries what it is and we thank all of them. Like we thanks the net of skilled and reliable suppliers, specialists and professionals who assist us in our work, like: Vicenza Thunders, Sisto Girardi, Beltramini & Partenich Design, Sandalo Produzioni and others.

I’m a Maker, I’m a Dreamer

I’m graduated in computer engineering and went to engineering college but I was not able to complete my studies and was forced to find myself a normal job. But I have always loved to learn by doing, my greed to experiment and increase my knowledge never stopped.

I had an artistic period, when I explored different forms of art from drawing to painting, from sculpture to pyrography engraving and photography. But my real passion has always been product design, hardware engineering and innovation.

I might be defined a self made Maker, I use to spend my spare time surfing the net looking for new information to learn, buying components and assembling them on my kitchen table into what they call Do It Yourself hardware projects.

Why stereolithography 3D Printing?

Around 2012, I started reading about the advantages of 3D printing and how it was becoming popular among the maker community. I was intrigued and, like any self-respecting Maker, I started building my own FFF printer. But a new technology grabbed my attention: stereolithography. It was less common, but able to provide a higher level of detail. Moreover a friend working as dentist, pushed me to work on this direction. This is how and why I developed LumiFold: the first foldable, portable and affordable DLP 3D printer with a very particular design. Design and portability will then become trademarks of my creations.

The power of Maker Faire and Crowdfunding

I decided to bring Lumifold, among other DIY projects, to the first Maker Faire in Rome in 2013, for which I had been selected. The project grabbed a lot of attention because it was the first time that the concept of portability was introduced into the Additive Manufacturing world. At the same time, I heard about this powerful grassroots funding tool for dreamers without resources like I was, called crowdfunding and I created by myself my first crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo international platform.

Despite the campaign was not professionally made and no communication strategy had been implemented, over 35 persons backed the project and many international online newspapers talked about it including The Guardian and TechCrunch. The Idea was validated and successful!

My dream to become a full time inventor and developer, did not seem anymore so remote…

a real Startup, starts in a garage!!

The Garage is where I placed my desktop CNC machine, and where I fully involved Manuela into this project. With no experience about DIY stuff, she had to learn how to use a CNC machine and help me, together with contributions from family and friends and great patience from our neighbors. While we were busy producing the 3D printers our backers had booked, we started imagining our future as full time inventor and …inventor’s assistant!

We realized that this project and the passion we put in making it come true, could become a real business. But where to start from and how? We did not have a capital or a clear idea on how to start. A friend talked to us about private entities with the mission of helping people like us to transform ideas into business: incubators.

Turning a passion into a company

We applied to the acceleration program of one of the biggest digital startup incubator in Italy, H-Farm, whose founder Riccardo Donadon was immediately fascinated by our projects and accepted us with enthusiasm.

It was time to take the big decision: keep our our normal routine life and permanent jobs, or jump full time into a new adventure and found our own company? You already know the answer!

If you don’t risk anything…you risk everything…

Our initial idea was to support Makers to develop their projects thanks to our 3D printing devices. This is was the aim of our following 3D Printer Lumipocket which was again created thanks to the supports of our backers and to a new crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo and on local platform Eppela. With our big surprise, the majority of our backers weren’t hobbyists, but jewellers, designers, miniature makers.

The device was actually so accurate that a lot of professionals started to use it for their work, providing a further validation to our work and leading to our next DLP model Lumiforge developed answering to the needs of our users.

In 2015 we celebrated our Maker origins launching a low cost All-in-One 3D printer and laser engraver, dedicated to all people wanting to explore resin 3D printing without investing in expensive professional devices: Lumipocket LT. This project too, was made possible thanks to the support of the backers of a successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.

Our Philosophy

Crowdfunding sons

We created four crowdfunding campaigns internally (on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Eppela) and all of them were, not only successful because we reached our goal, but because we always delivered to our backers what we have promised them, making us may be the only Italian company completing 4 successful crowdfunding campaigns out of 4!

We believe in the power of crowdfunding! We are the living  proof that this tool can really help inventive people with big ideas, little money and no external support, like us. Crowdfunding helped us validate our projects, gave us international exposure and the chance to make a living out of our passion.

LUMI INDUSTRIES: NOT ONLy 3d printing

Why we decided to call ourselves LUMI INDUSTRIES?

Lumi, as “light”, because our core activity is related to Stereolithography 3D printing, using light curing resins. Industries, because it gives the idea of an entity that can make many different things. Since we like to invent and develop any kind of hardware, we want to keep our horizons open to all ideas and opportunities.

This is why you will find in our pages projects like VVD the Volumetric Visualization Device or project ideas like Soll-E, a laser sintering module for sand or Lumi Sweet, a laser sintering solution to create sugar solid objects, which are not directly related to Stereolithography.

can makers deliver professional products?

Many people think that a Maker is a Half Designer, who simply make and does not plan or refines his/her creation as implementation progresses, or an Half Engineer, who does not consider future steps of a product life.

This is not applicable to our team. Thanks to our background and our net of technical suppliers, experts and professionals: we are Makers, Engineers and Designers at the same time!

Our empathy towards our users, allow us to understand what costumers wants from our devices, being them 3D printers or other: high quality output, user-friendliness, reliability, affordability, helpful post-sale assistance. Our expertise, our care about innovation, design and small details, the passion we put in what we do, are the key to provide state of the art Made in Italy hardware products with high quality standards, refined details and attractive design.

In the same time, we are still Maker inside. We are curious, optimistic, creative, resourceful. We like to play with technology and develop projects that can attract more people, adults and kids, to experiment and use these new digital technologies.

This is why, beside very professional devices, like our LumiForge and upcoming Lumi³ (LumiCUBE) resin based 3D printers or third parties projects, you will find in our portfolio more playful ones. Like LumipocketLT or upcoming LumiBee, dedicated to hobbyst and 3D printing newcomers! But, although they may be considered, Makers’ projects, you will always recognize in them our care for details and design.

Becoming open Innovation partners

Thanks to our expertise in developing a full project from scratch and our crowdfunding experience, we have been appointed by other companies to the development of projects in their behalf or in providing marketing consultancies or project ideas.

Among other partners like Leroy Merlin, H-Farm, Engineering Team, we got the chance to cooperate with multinational company Ivoclar Vivadent, one of the leading companies in the dental industry worldwide. As one of their open innovation partners, we worked on a complex hardware project from concept development to the realization of working prototypes to demonstrate the feasibility of our joint ideas.

So if you have an hardware idea and you don’t know how to make it real or you want to create your crowdfunding campaign and be successful, we can help you! Check here for more information.

LUMI INDUSTRIES CARES

We believe in receive and give back. This is why we love the idea to invest part of our resources to the development of innovative assistive Open Source projects, mainly involving 3D printing. In this way we want to give our contribution to assistive technology advancement for the benefits of people with disabilities. Check our projects here and find out some collaborations that were born thanks to our projects.

OPEN SOURCE & PATENTS

We are aware that to attain a certain level of accuracy and quality in the hardware products we offer and to be able to proceed with our mission, we need to protect some of our ideas with patents. My first patent is on New Lumifold unique mechanical system, a project I was dreaming about since the very beginning of this story, but it is not and it won’t be the only one.

However as inventor, Maker and innovator, I also believe in the power of Open Source, which mean to grant to anyone the permission to use, modify and improve a product software source code, design, or content.

For this reason, at Lumi Industries, we decided that beside to products covered by patent, because of their development and nature, we will always propose Open Source Projects that can involve the Maker community for the sake of innovation, advancement, and evolution of the idea itself.

Text To Braille converter and Lumipocket LT All-in-one resin 3D printer, are some completely free project for which you can find full Open Source details.

So use your creativity, roll up your sleeves, warm up your soldering stations and let’s innovate and share! If you have any improvement you did to any of our project please share it with us and the whole community!

Among our costumers