Nicholas Peter Wilson/Hilos
- Hilos this week announced a $3 million investment round.
- The company makes 3D-printed footwear.
- The investments from Sprunk and Greg Bui amount to sizzling endorsements.
The 3D-printed footwear company Hilos has announced a $3 million investment round that includes funding from longtime Nike executives, including former Chief Operating Officer Eric Sprunk.
Sprunk's former Nike colleague Greg Bui and venture capital firms Better Ventures, Builders VC and XRC Labs also participated in the round.
As part of the round, Bui, who worked at Nike as vice president of global footwear sourcing and manufacturing, joined Hilos staff to work on special projects.
Hilos, based just a short drive from Nike's suburban Portland, Oregon, headquarters, has now raised $5 million. The company will use the latest funding to continue scaling the business, it said. The investment serves as an attention-grabbing endorsement, both of Hilos and 3D-shoe printing, as the race to develop the technology accelerates.
Hilos wants to crack the code on 3D printing in order to limit waste by sneaker manufacturers and get shoes to customers faster by making them closer to home.
Footwear manufacturing is inherently wasteful and time consuming. It requires making a mold of a foot, called a last, then piecing a shoe together around it. Most shoes are made with 65 parts and 360 manufacturing steps, according to a study Hilos did in partnership with Yale. Additional waste gets created at each step.
On top of that, most sneakers get sewn and glued together in Southeast Asia, which means extra carbon emissions from shipping compared to creating products in home markets.
Hilos also estimates one in five shoes go straight to landfills.
Hannah Shea Becker/Hilos
"This is an industry that perpetuates overproduction and there are so many incredible innovations happening around materials, but nothing is targeting overproduction," Hilos CEO and cofounder Elias Stahl told Insider.
Hilos' technology works like this: When a customer purchases a shoe, Hilos makes another one available in a matter of days. Since the shoes are made with 3D printers, they're made in the US, not in Southeast Asia.
"We developed a new way to make shoes so that the moment a customer buys, or someone walks off out of the store with something, we make and resupply that product within 72 hours," Stahl said. "We're now fulfilling at the speed as if something was made in advance and sitting in a distribution center."
Hilos makes soles from a type of plastic, technically TPU, or thermoplastic polyurethane, that is made from 80% recycled material. Stahl said 100% of the TPU Hilos uses can be used again. It makes uppers from leather or knit material.
A single 3D printer can make over 500 pairs of shoes a month. Hilos has access to "dozens and dozens" of printers, Stahl said, as it gets ready to scale.
Hilos works with existing brands that use its technology, though Stahl declined to name brands that work with Hilos because of confidentiality agreements.
The industry's biggest brands, including Nike, Adidas, and Brooks, are among those working on 3D-printed footwear. When he was at Nike, Sprunk was in charge of the company's "manufacturing revolution."
Stahl and Hilos "have the passion, creativity, and intellect to break-through and lead a footwear manufacturing revolution," Sprunk said, in a statement to Insider.
"Anytime you can drive disruption in an industry like footwear, it's really difficult to do," Bui said. "No one in the industry is working on serving the consumer radically differently. And if you can serve the consumer differently, that's a compelling proposition."
"If you started with the premise of, 'I want to make a new footwear company,' how would you do it? You would do it the way that Hilos is doing it," Bui added.
That's what drew XRC Labs to the investment.
"You manufacture 12 months, 18 months ahead of demand, so you create these ridiculous excesses of product," XRC Labs general partner Al Sambar told Insider. "It ends up in landfills, being burned and destroyed. Hilos changes fundamentally the way an industry that's existed for centuries works."