Apple’s Former Hardware Chief Just Bought Into Formlabs — and the Board Was Rebuilt the Same Day

Key takeaways

Dan Riccio, Apple’s former Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, has joined Formlabs as a strategic advisor and made a personal investment in the company, announced 12 August 2026.
Board member Rob Willett, the former CEO of Cognex, is increasing his own stake. Neither investment amount was disclosed.
Co-founder and CEO Max Lobovsky becomes Chairman of the Board, taking over from co-founder Natan Linder, who steps off the board after fifteen years and stays on as an advisor.
Chief Product Officer Dávid Lakatos has been named President and joins the board. Nadia Shouraboura, formerly Amazon’s head of worldwide supply chain and fulfilment, becomes Lead Director.
Formlabs says it now clears more than $250 million in annual revenue, and that its customers have printed over 500 million parts.

The man who ran Apple’s hardware just wrote a cheque to a 3D printer company

Formlabs announced on 12 August that Dan Riccio — the executive who led Apple’s Product Design and Hardware Engineering organisations for decades, across the iPhone, iPad and Mac — has become a strategic advisor to the company and an investor in it. The announcement went out over Business Wire and was picked up by TCT Magazine and Engineering.com the same week.

Riccio’s brief, per Formlabs, is to advise the leadership team on “product development, design rigor, and operational scaling” as the company pushes further into industrial and professional 3D printing. He is not taking a board seat. He is taking an advisory role and a position on the cap table.

“Formlabs has quietly built one of the most complete hardware, software, and materials platforms I’ve seen outside of a handful of the world’s best consumer companies,” Riccio said in the announcement. Lobovsky’s framing was blunter: “Dan spent a career building some of the most beloved hardware products in the world, at an enormous scale, and he did it by obsessing over details most executives don’t care about.”

Riccio is not investing alone. Rob Willett, a sitting board member and the former chief executive of machine-vision company Cognex, is putting more money in as well. “I said when I joined the board that Formlabs was uniquely positioned to lead the next era of digital manufacturing,” Willett said. “Everything I’ve seen since has convinced me to lean in further.” Formlabs disclosed neither figure.

The board reshuffle is the bigger story

Strip out the Apple headline and what’s left is a fairly comprehensive rewiring of how Formlabs is governed.

Max Lobovsky, co-founder and CEO, adds Chairman of the Board to his title. He takes it from Natan Linder, the other co-founder, who is stepping down from the board after fifteen years and moving to a strategic advisor role. Dávid Lakatos — Chief Product Officer, one of the earliest employees, and the person who has run product for more than a decade, from the original Kickstarter-funded printer through the current SLA and SLS lines — is named President and joins the board.

The fourth change is the one to watch. Nadia Shouraboura, on the Formlabs board since 2022, becomes Lead Director. Before this she ran worldwide supply chain and fulfilment at Amazon and sat on its executive leadership team. Formlabs explicitly ties her elevation to expanding its manufacturing footprint and scaling the industrial platform globally. Boards do not promote a supply-chain operator to Lead Director unless supply chain is about to become the constraint.

Why it matters

Context makes this land harder. The last twelve months in additive have mostly been a story of contraction: 3D Systems is hunting for a new CEO after Jeffrey Graves announced his retirement on 4 August, Ricoh has offloaded its healthcare 3D printing arm, and the American mid-market has been thinning out. Formlabs is doing the opposite: consolidating founder control, adding an operator-heavy board, and bringing in outside money on the strength of the platform rather than out of necessity.

The company describes itself as the largest professional 3D printing business founded since the 1980s, with annual revenue above $250 million, more than 45 materials, and a customer base that has printed north of half a billion parts. Those are Formlabs’ own figures, not audited public filings — Formlabs is private — but they are the numbers it is now putting its name to publicly, which is itself a shift in posture for a company that has historically said very little about its finances.

For anyone running a Form printer or a Fuse in a workshop, none of this changes tomorrow’s print. What it changes is the trajectory. Hiring the person who industrialised iPhone manufacturing to advise on “operational scaling,” while promoting an Amazon logistics veteran to Lead Director, is not the setup of a company planning to stay the same size.

FAQ

Who is Dan Riccio?

Apple’s former Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering. He led Apple’s Product Design and Hardware Engineering organisations for decades, overseeing development of the company’s hardware products including the iPhone, iPad and Mac. He has now joined Formlabs as a strategic advisor and investor.

How much did Riccio invest in Formlabs?

Formlabs did not disclose the amount, and it did not disclose the size of Rob Willett’s follow-on investment either. Both were described only as personal investments.

Is Formlabs going public?

Formlabs has not announced an IPO and said nothing about one in this announcement. It remains a private company. The announcement does list a Head of Investor Relations as a press contact, but that is not a filing and should not be read as one.

What does a Lead Director actually do?

A Lead Director is the senior independent voice on a board, typically used to preserve independent oversight when the CEO also holds the chairmanship — exactly the situation created here by Lobovsky taking the Chairman role. Shouraboura will fill that function.

Sources

Formlabs / Business Wire press release, “Formlabs Announces Former Apple Hardware Chief Dan Riccio as a Strategic Advisor and Board Changes” (12 August 2026) · TCT Magazine (13 August 2026) · Engineering.com (12 August 2026).